The

Sociology
of
Science

By the Same Author

Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Century England

Mass Persuasion [with Marjorie Fiske and Alberta Curtis]
Social Theory and Social Structure
The Focused Interview [with Marjorie Fiske and Patricia Kendall]
The Freedom to Read [with Richard McKeon and Walter Gellhorh]
On the Shoulders of Giants
On Theoretical Sociology
Sociological Ambivalence
Sociology of Science: An Episodic Memoir
Continuities in Social Research [with Paul F. Lazarsfeld]
Reader in Bureaucracy [with Ailsa Gray, Barbara Hockey, and
Hanan Selvin]
The Student-Physician [with George G. Reader and Patricia L. Kendall]
Sociology Today [with Leonard Broom and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr.]
Contemporary Social Problems [with Robert A. Nisbet]
The Sociology of Science in Europe [with Jerry Gaston]
Toward a Metric of Science [with Yehuda Elkana, Joshua Lederberg,
Arnold Thackray, and Harriet Zuckerman]
Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research: Papers in Honor of
Paul F. Lazarfeld [with James S. Coleman and Peter H. Ross]

Robert K.
Merton
Edited and
with an Introduction by
Norman W. Storer

The
Sociology
of
Science
Theoretical and
Empirical
Investigations

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

<D 1973 by Robert K. Merton

All rights reserved. Published 1973.
Printed in the United States of America
International Standard Book Number: 0-22(r..52091-9 (cloth);
0-22(r..52092-7 (paper)
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-97623
96 95 94 93

4567

To my teachers

Pitirim A. Sorokin
Talcott Parsons
George Sarton
L. J. Henderson
A. N. Whitehead
who together formed
my interest in the
sociological study of
science

Contents

Author's Preface

ix

Introduction by Norman W. Storer

xt
The Sociology of
Scientific Knowledge

The Sociology of
Knowledge

Prefatory Note

1.

Paradigm for the Sociology of

Knowledge 7

2.
3.

Prefatory Note

139

6.

Znaniecki's Social Role of the

Man of Knowledge 41

Sorokin's Formulations in the

Sociology of Science 142
[with Bernard Barber]

7.

Social Conflict over Styles of

Sociological Work 47

Social and Cultural Contexts of

Science 173

8.

Changing Foci of Interest in

the Sciences and
Technology 191

9.

Interactions of Science and

Military Technique 204

4.

Technical and Moral Dimensions of Policy Research 70

5.

The Perspectives of Insiders

and Outsiders 99

I 0. The Neglect of the Sociology

of Science 2 I 0

viii

Contents

The Normative Structure

of Science

PrefatoryNote

223

The Reward System

of Science

Prefatory Note

281

11. The Puritan Spur to

Science 228

14. Priorities in Scientific

Discovery 286

12. Science and the Social

Order 254

15. Behavior Patterns of

Scientists 325

13. The Normative Structure of

Science 267

16. Singletons and Multiples in

Science 343
17. Multiple Discoveries as
Strategic Research Site 371
18. The Ambivalence of
Scientists 383

The Processes of
Evaluation in Science

Prefatory Note

415

19. Recognition and Excellence:

Instructive Ambiguities 419
20. The Matthew Effect in
Science 439
21. Institutionalized Patterns of
Evaluation in Science 460
[with Harriet Zuckerman]
22. Age, Aging, and Age Structure
in Science 497
[with Harriet Zuckerman]
Bibliography

561

Index of Names
Index of Subjects

577
587

Author's Preface

After a long gestation, the sociology of science has finally emerged as a

distinct sociological specialty. Having evolved a cognitive identity in the
form of intellectual orientations, paradigms, problematics and tools of
inquiry, it has begun to develop a professional identity as well, in the form
of institutionalized arrangements for research and training, journals given
over to the subject in part or whole, and invisible colleges of specialists
engaged in mutually related inquiry and not infrequent controversy. In
these as in its other aspects, the sociology of science exhibits a strongly
self-exemplifying character: its own behavior as a discipline exemplifies
current ideas and findings about the emergence of scientific specialties.
In the light of this development, there is now more point than before
in taking up the suggestion of Michael Aronson of the University of
Chicago Press to bring together some of my papers in the sociology of
science which are presently scattered in various journals, symposia, and
other books. Still, like Alfred Schutz facing a similar decision, I must
recognize that few of us can bring to our own work the distance and
hopefully exacting judgment of an informed editor. I am therefore indebted to Professor Norman W. Storer for agreeing to select and arrange
the papers, to provide the general introduction and prefatory notes, and
to eliminate repetition except when, in his opinion, it provides redundancy
useful for highlighting continuities of theme and idea. Having contributed
to the field for more than a decade, Professor Storer is thoroughly at home
in it and able to put these perspectives on the sociological study of science
into historical and intellectual context.

Reiteration would only dull the thanks I express in the individual papers
to the many who have helped me get on with my work in this field. But
there are other, current debts. I thank Richard Lewis for help in reading
the proofs of this book, and Mary Miles and Hedda Garza for preparing
the index. I owe special thanks to my colleagues Bernard Barber, Harriet
Zuckerman, and Richard Lewis for allowing me to reprint our joint
papers, and to Elinor Barber for allowing me to draw upon our published
and unpublished collaborative work. I gladly acknowledge the help given
me by a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, by a term as Visiting Scholar of the Russell Sage Foundation and,
more recently, by a grant from the National Science Foundation in support of the Columbia University Program in the Sociology of Science.
I, for one, must testify to the growing worth of that program as I agreeably observe that my colleagues in it-Harriet Zuckerman, Stephen Cole,
and Jonathan Cole-have come to teach me increasingly more than I
have ever been capable of teaching them. I have also benefitted much
from the thought and friendship of William J. Goode since those distant
days when we first worked together in the sociology of the professions.
And in this latest retrospect, I discover once again how much I have
learned from Paul F. Lazarsfeld, in joint seminars, in other joint ventures
and, most of all, from our continuing dialogue through the years.
R. K. M.

Introduction
By Norman W. Storer

If Robert K. Merton has not yet been publicly described as a founding

father of the sociology of science, there is at least substantial agreement
among those who know the field that its present strength and vitality are
largely the result of his labors over the past forty years. His work has given
the discipline its major paradigm. This judgment is perhaps most decisively
affirmed when set forth not by the many whose work is guided by that
paradigm but by those who find fault with some aspect of it. Barry Barnes,
for instance, who with R. G. A. Dolby 1 has strongly argued the case against
certain assumptions in the paradigm, sums things up by observing that
A dominant influence in this development [of the sociology of science as a
separate academic specialty] was the work of Robert Merton, both as writer
and teacher. By 1945 Merton had laid down an approach which identified
science as a social institution with a characteristic ethos, and subjected it to
functional analysis. This was for a long period the only theoretical approach
available to sociologists in the area, and it remains productive and influential
today. Its central ideas have received detailed elaboration, modification and
reinterpretation by, among others, Barber, Hagstrom, Storer and Merton himself, making it the only maturely developed framework for the sociological
study of science. 2
1. S. B. Barnes and R.G.A. Dolby, "The Scientific Ethos: A Deviant Viewpoint,"
European Journal of Sociology, 11 (1970): 3-25.
2. Barry Barnes, ed., Sociology of Science: Selected Readings (London and Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 9-10. And again, Barnes notes: "The only long
standing tradition in the sociology of science derives from Robert K. Merton's insights into the nature of its institutional structure" (Ibid., p 61). For similar observations, see the opening paragraph of the critical essay by Michael Mulkay, "Some
Aspects of Cultural Growth in the Natural Sciences," Social Research 36 (1969):
22-52, and pages 244-46 of Kenneth J. Downey, "Sociology and the Modern Scientific Revolution" (Sociological Quarterly 8 [1967]: 239-54).

xii

Introduction

As a sociological specialty, the field has come alive only in the past
fifteen years or so; the upward turn in the logistic curve describing its
growth (which we know is typical of new, "hot" specialties in many fields
of science) began in the mid-fifties. It would perhaps be a sign of premature senility, or at least of the flattening of the S-shaped curve, for any
new field other than the sociology of science to begin so early to examine
its own development. But this field has the peculiar character of being grist
for its own mill. Yesterday's achievements-and failures-are data for
today's research on the growth of scientific specialties, as is the case with
no other specialized discipline. This unique property carries its own hazards. Too much thinking about one's own thinking can produce intellectual
stasis; too much questioning of one's own questions can produce a kind
of sociological anomie. Yet such difficulties can scarcely be allowed to
dissuade us from trying to understand the character and development of
this special field.
The papers collected her~ are intended to serve several purposes. Primarily, the volume brings together a number of articles that have been of
central significance in the development of the sociology of science, together
with others which are representative of certain stages in that process. At
the same time, the collection may provide a sense of the intellectual continuity and coherence of the field; more clearly here than in some other
fields of sociology, the seeds of future growth can be readily found in
papers antedating this growth by ten years and more. In a more practical
vein, enclosing these papers drawn from many different sources within a
single cover will afford easy access to them for those wanting to make use
of them in their own work. Finally, the collection pays tribute to the
author; the substance and style of the papers themselves record, in a way
mere panegyric could not, the enduring importance of his work.
The papers are not presented in strictly chronological order. The warp
and woof of the entire corpus is drawn so tight-the intersections of different threads of thought are so frequent-that it has seemed better to
separate and group the major elements in this mosaic for concentrated
attention than to leave the task entirely to the reader. It is hoped that in
this way the continued clarification of ideas and the ways they have been
woven together to give added strength to this growing body of knowledge
will be made more visible.
But the papers themselves, even with the extensive footnoting that has
been characteristic of Merton's work since the beginning, cannot provide
full perspective on the larger scene-the social and intellectual context
within which they have been produced and to which they have contributed.
It is the aim of this introduction to supply such perspective from the vantage point of 1973, aiming not at anything like a history of the sociology
of science but rather at sketching the major landmarks and problems that

Introduction

xiii

have provided its broad outlines. Additional detail will be found in the
prefatory notices to each of the five parts of the volume.
The sociology of science is sometimes defined as a part of the sociology
of knowledge, and yet the multifaceted problem of the relations between
knowledge and reality (not to speak of the reality of knowledge) is a more
general one, at the heart of the larger part of sociology. Studies of religion
and ideology, of the mass media and public opinion, and of norms and
values, to say nothing of the methodological concerns of sociologists, all
implicate the chicken-and-egg question of the interdependence of these
two fundamental components of human life in groups. How do existential,
everyday experiences mold the ways in which people conceptualize the
world? How, in tum, do their conceptualizations influence their actions
in the world, and how, further, do they react to discrepancies between
what they "know" and what they experience?
It is perhaps because Wissenssoziologie, the sociology of knowledge, in
a sense defined its concerns so narrowly in the beginning, focusing almost
exclusively on trying to reason out the extent to which men's knowledge
is shaped by their interests and experiences, that it had fallen into disarray
by the 1930s. Indeed, as Merton's examination of the field in 1945 (included here as "Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge") demonstrates,
this particular question contained within itself the petard by which it would
eventually be hoist. To conclude that knowledge is not at all molded by
men's experiences would undermine the raison d'etre of the field, while to
conclude that it is altogether so molded would seem tantamount to questioning, if not denying, the validity of all knowledge-including that
conclusion. This restricted construction of the problem led to a maze of
internal contradictions, a cul-de-sac from which escape had to be sought
by beginning anew with different questions.
Such questions were, of course, vigorously pursued in different sectors
of the sociological community. Weber's work on the importance of the
Protestant Weltanschauung in producing capitalism in Europe had already
had a long and effectively controversial history by the time Merton saw its
relevance to his interest in the history of science. Durkheim's work on
primitive religion and his orientation to problems in the sociology of knowledge was beginning to attract the notice even of some American sociologists. The task was to put the various problems back into some sort of
orderly array.
In the early 1930s, however, Merton's interest was not primarily in the
sociology of knowledge. During his graduate studies at Harvard, he undertook, at the suggestion of the economic historian E. F. Gay, an analytical
book review of A. P. Usher's History of Mechanical Invention. Gay liked
it and suggested that George Sarton, also at Harvard, publish it in Isis,
the prime journal in the history of science which he had founded and still

xiv

Introduction

edited. Sarton did so, and he encouraged Merton's interest in the history
of science by having him work in the renowned workshop in Widener
Library. Noting his growing expertise in this field, Pitirim A. Sorokin
recruited Merton to assist him in the studies of the development of science
that would make up parts of his Social and Cultural Dynamics. This provided valuable experience in focusing on the development of quantitative
measures of intellectual development and change, and perhaps paved the
way to "prosopography"-"the study of the common background characteristics of a group of actors in history by means of a collective study of
their lives" 3-which Merton was to employ extensively in his later work.
Merton also studied with L. J. Henderson, the biochemist who had made
a place for Sarton at Harvard and who was himself a gifted teacher of the
history of science. 4 He attended the course of lectures in the philosophy
of science given by Alfred North Whitehead and the unique course on
comparative "animal sociology" in which specialists on a score of social
species were brought together by William Morton Wheeler, the dean of
entomologists whose omnivorous intellectual appetite included the history
of science. And his early work on social aspects of science was monitored
by the polymath E. B. Wilson, then associated with the new department
of sociology. Merton was thus responding to the many opportunities at
Harvard to develop various perspectives on science by going beyond the
conventional boundaries of sociology, even though he continued in the department to be the student of Sorokin and, increasingly, of the young
instructor, Talcott Parsons.
It was apparently this confluence of varied intellectual currents, rather
than immediate developments in the sociology of knowledge, that led
Merton to attempt a sociological analysis of the growth and development
of science and that laid the foundation for his continuing interest in science
as a distinctive social activity. Not that he was at this time unconcerned
with the broader conceptual framework in which science could be located.
Two papers5 testify to this wider theoretical orientation. In 1935 he published in Isis a review of recent work in the sociology of knowledge by
Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim, Alexander von Schelting, and Ernst GrUnwald. In the next year he published "Civilization and Culture," a paper
that located knowledge as a distinct focus of sociological interest in rela3. For an account of Merton's role in this development, see Lawrence Stone,
"Prosopography," Daedalus 100 (1971): 46-79.
4. For an account of Henderson's role in sociology, see the introduction to L. J.
Henderson, On the Social System: Selected Writings, ed. and with an introduction by
Bernard Barber (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); for an account of
Sarton's role in shaping the history of science, see Arnold Thackray and Robert K.
Merton, "On Discipline-Building: The Paradoxes of George Sarton," Isis 63 (1972):
473-95.
5. The Bibliography lists all of Merton's writings cited here.

Introduction

xv

tion to concepts advanced by Alfred Weber and Robert Maciver. The

concept of "culture" covered the realm of values and normative principles,
while the concept of "civilization" included theoretical knowledge and
practical technique, which tended-abstractly, not concretely-to be more
accumulative than culture. In examining these concepts, Merton rejected
the positivist interpretation of unilinear accumulation in science which was
inherent in Alfred Weber's failure to deal adequately with the interdependence between culture and civilization. He claimed that this led Weber
"virtually to revert to a theory of progress. What must be borne in mind
is that accumulation is but an abstractly immanent characteristic of civilization. Hence concrete movements which always involve interaction with
other spheres need not embody such a development." 6
It was at this same time that Merton wrote his dissertation, Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (begun in 1933 and
completed two years later). Although the monograph did much to inaugurate the idea of systematic empirical investigation into the social matrix
of science, it was not, of course, produced ab initio. In the United States,
for instance, there had been W. F. Ogburn's major work, Social Change,
and his paper with Dorothy S. Thomas, "Are Inventions Inevitable?"
which developed basic conceptions about the social evolution of science
and technology. 7 Ogburn's longtime research associate, S. Colum Gilfillan,
published The Sociology of Invention in the mid-30s, setting forth almost
forty "social principles of invention. " 8 And in Europe a delegation from
the Soviet Union, led by Bukharin, to the Second International Congress
of the History of Science and Technology held in London (1931) had
produced the volume of contributed papers, Science at the Cross Roads. 9
The most noticed contribution was the essay, "The Social and Economic
Roots of Newton's 'Principia'," by Boris Hessen, the director of the
Moscow Institute of Physics, which helped to reinforce and to focus interest
in the social aspects of scientific knowledge. But, as noted by Robert S.
6. "Civilization and Culture," pp. 110-11.
7. William F. Ogburn, Social Change (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1922; new ed.,
New York: Viking Press, 1950); W. F. Ogburn and Dorothy S. Thomas, "Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social Evolution," Political Science Quarterly 37
( 1922): 83-98. See also W. F. Ogburn, On Culture and Social Change: Selected
Papers, ed. and with an introduction by Otis Dudley Duncan (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1964).
8. Chicago: Follett Publishing Company, 1935. The field of study of the social
aspects of invention was so thinly populated at this time that Gilfillan was moved to
include Merton, then the author of just a few papers in the field, among the eight
"fellow students" of the subject to whom the book is dedicated. See also S. Colum
Gilfillan, Supplement to the Sociology of Invention (San Francisco: San Francisco
Press, 1971).
9. London: Kniga Ltd., 1931. Reprinted with a new foreword by Joseph Needham
and a new introduction by P. G. Werskey (London: Frank Cass, 1971).

xvi

Introduction

Cohen in his introduction to the recent separate reprinting of that essay, 10

its influence was mostly visible not in Stalin's Soviet Union, where Hessen
soon disappeared from view, but in England, where it appeared in the far
more discriminating historical work of scientists on the political left, such
as Joseph Needham, J.D. Bernal, Lancelot Hogben, and J. B.S. Haldane,
and in the rebuttals by such historians as Charles Singer, G. N. Clark, and
Herbert Butterfield. In the United States, Hessen's essay and Clark's
criticism of it were both taken into account in Merton's monograph. 11
It was still too soon, in the mid-1930s, for that monograph to concentrate on the social structure of the emerging scientific community. As its
title indicates, Merton's attention was directed to science in society, both
its emergence as a social institution, fostered by the particular valuecomplex which was the hallmark of Puritanism, and its response to contemporary social interests (for example, practical problems of military
technology, mining, and navigation).
But in the emphasis placed on the values that characterized the seventeenth-century practitioners -of science, the foundations had been laid for
later work that would trace the ethos of science and use it to define science
as a subsystem of society and civilization. Contemporary events probably
served to reinforce interest in the problem. The annihilative fate of "nonAryan science" in Hitler's Germany during the 1930s directed attention
to the various social conditions under which science can lose its autonomy;
in the paper "Science and the Social Order" (presented in 1937), we find
Merton's first allusions to the "norms of pure science" and signs of his
developing interest in the structure and dynamics of the scientific community as distinguished from (and later related to) its substantive concerns.
As Joseph Ben-David has noted, 12 the concept of the "scientific community"
as a collectivity that evolves its own norms and policies was brought into
sharp focus by Michael Polanyi from the early 1940s onward, was devel10. New York: Howard Fertig, lnc., 1971.
11. Joseph Needham, for example, reports that, having an interest in the history
of science and having long been on the political left, it was only natural for him
to attend the Congress and to be "very ready to give a sympathetic hearing to the
Russian delegation." A few years later, in his History of Embryology (1934 ), he
referred favorably to the Hessen essay as providing one model for historical research and, in his foreword to the recently reprinted volume of the Congress (see
the reference in footnote 9), he notes that "with all its unsophisticated bluntness,
[it] had a great influence during the subsequent forty years." The extent of that influence and the differences between the Hessen and Merton formulations are indicated in I. B. Cohen's review-essay on Merton's book in Scientific American 228
( 1973): 117-20.
12. Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist's Role in Society (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971), pp. 3-4; and "The Profession of Science and Its Powers,"
Minerva 10 ( 1972): 377.

Introduction

xvii

oped by Edward Shils in the 1950s, and became a basic conception in the
sociology of science in the 1960sP
Recently, it should be noted, there has been renewed observation that
the nature and direction of scientific growth cannot be adequately understood without dealing specifically with the contents of science-its concepts, data, theories, paradigms, and methods. The idea that the development of science can be analyzed at all effectively, apart from the concrete
research of scientists, is said to have proven false. 14 The study of science,
after all, begins with its product, scientific knowledge, rather than simply
with those individuals who occupy the social position of "scientist." (This,
incidentally, may account for the dearth of sociological studies focused
on run-of-the-mill or relatively unproductive scientists: so long as science
is defined by its research product, those who contribute little directly to
that product are difficult to fit into the picture.)
Regarding the strategy of inquiry, however, it can be argued rather
forcefully that it is of basic importance, especially in the beginning of
sociological inquiry into the subject, to distinguish the behavior of scientists as scientists from the details of their "output"-if only to attend to
the diverse aspects of doing science and to reduce the number of variables
being considered at a given time. A comparable strategy is in fact employed by Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions/ 5
except that there the focus is on the formal organization of scientific
knowledge and it is the social variables that need to be successively identified. Sociologically, it was necessary to identify the boundaries of the
scientific community and to explore the bases of its place within society
before the sociology of science could proceed to a range of other problems.
(Indeed, the question of why science becomes established in any society,
when most people can neither profit directly from the work of scientists
nor comprehend and appreciate what they are doing, forms the central
problem to which Joseph Ben-David addresses himself in his recent book
on The Scientist's Role in Society. 16 )
13. Polanyi's early paper of 1942, "Self-Government of Science," is included in his
collection of essays, The Logic of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1951 ), pp. 49-67; the general idea is developed in his many later books (see, for
example, Personal Knowledge [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958]). Edward
Shils, "Scientific Community: Thoughts After Hamburg," Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists 10 (1954): 1151-55, reprinted in Edward Shils, The Intellectuals and the
Powers, Selected Papers, vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp.
204-12. The developments in the 1960s are considered later in this introduction.
14. See, for instance, Barnes and Dolby, "The Scientific Ethos"; Mulkay, "Some
Aspects of Cultural Growth"; and M. D. King, "Reason, Tradition, and the Progressiveness of Science," History and Theory 10 (1971): 3-32.
15. Second ed., enlarged (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
16. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971.

xviii

Introduction

While there is no clear sign that Merton was then fully aware of the
need for such a strategy, it does now seem that it was critically important
to establish the relevance of distinctively sociological analyses to the study
of science if the field were to develop at all. The social structure of an
institution and the general orientations that characterize its participants,
after all, can be separated from the specific concerns and activities that
occupy their attention during particular periods of time. Thus, to take an
analogous case, we assume that the central dynamics of public opinion
are the same, whether its substantive focus is a war, an economic situation,
a religious revival, or a fad.
Having explored the problematics of scientific knowledge in his monograph, with particular attention to the social as well as intellectual sources
of foci of investigation in science, Merton evidently became persuaded
that further sociological analysis required a more systematic conception of
the social structure of science. It is significant that his early (1935) paper
with Sorokin, "The Course of Arabian Intellectual Development, 7001300 A.D.," is subtitled "A Study in Method." The fact was that without a
sufficiently well-developed model of the social structure of science, there
was no way to generate theoretically important questions that could use
systematic data on scientific development to advantage. A research method
is not much use if it cannot be coupled with theoretical questions (even
though it may, through producing certain kinds of new data, encourage
the subsequent development of theory).
So the decision was made, or perhaps evolved, to concentrate on the
social structure of science rather than to continue with study of the social
contexts that influence its substantive output of knowledge. The first phase
of this work appeared in 1942 with the publication of "A Note on Science
and Democracy" (reprinted here under the more appropriate title, "The
Normative Structure of Science"). In this paper appeared the comprehensive statement of ideal norms to which scientists are oriented in their
relations with each other: universalism, communism, organized skepticism,
and disinterestedness.
Widely adopted as it has been, Merton's description of the "ethos of
science" has not, it should be remarked, met with universal acceptance
over the thirty years since its publication. Criticism, however, has been
concentrated not so much on its having mistaken the components of this
ethos, but on the question whether these norms in fact guide scientists'
everyday behavior. No one has come forward with a radically different
set of norms, but various critics have pointed out that scientists frequently
violate one or more of the indicated norms. Thus, the treatment of the
controversial Immanuel Velikovsky by members of the "scientific establishment" in the early 1950s is the one case repeatedly cited as an instance
of widespread defection from the norms of universalism and disinterested-

Introduction

xix

ness. 17 There have been scattered attempts to measure the extent of commitment among scientists to the norms identified by Merton. The most
recent of these, although its conclusions are limited by imperfect operationalization of some of these norms, finds substantial orientation to them
in a sample of nearly a thousand American scientists, the extent of this
varying somewhat by scientific discipline, scientific role, and organizational
affiliation of scientists. 18
It is, of course, the case that the behavior of scientists does not invariably adhere to the norms. But the implication sometimes drawn from this
fact that the norms are therefore irrelevant stems from a misapprehension
of the ways in which social norms operate. The theoretical problem is one
of identifying the conditions under which behavior tends to conform to
norms or to depart from them and to make for their change. Norms of this
sort are associated primarily with a social role, so that even when they
have been internalized by individuals, they come into play primarily in
those situations in which the role is being performed and socially supported. When scientists are aware that their colleagues are oriented to
these same norms-and know that these provide effective and legitimate
rules for interaction in "routine" scientific situations-their behavior is the
more likely to accord with them. These routine situations occur most
frequently within an accepted universe of discourse, or paradigm; when
there is general agreement on the ground-rules of the game (for example,
basic concepts and problems, criteria of validity, etc.), acting in terms of
the rules becomes personally rewarding and reinforces institutional bases
for the development of knowledge. It is when such a universe of discourse
is only slightly developed (as during the Kuhnian "pre-paradigm" stage
in the development of a new discipline or during a "scientific revolution"),
or when group loyalties outside the domain of science take over, that
violations of the norms become more frequent, leading some to reject the
norms entirely.
This analysis puts us somewhat ahead in the discussion of the development of the sociology of science, bringing in as it does explicit attention
to the content of science (even though not at the level of specific data or
theories). It was not until the late 1960s that the tactical advantages to be
gained from drawing a sharp distinction between the social structure of
science and its specific substantive output had been realized-the sociology
of science had become established by then-and the time was ripe to pay
17. Alfred de Grazia, ed., The Velikovsky Affair (New York: University Books,
1966).
18. Marian Blissett, Politics in Science (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1972),
pp. 65-89, appendixes A, B, and C. An exploratory study by S. Stewart West ("The
Ideology of Academic Scientists," IRE Transactions on Engineering Management
EM-7 [1960]: 54-62) could be only suggestive at best, since it was based on responses
from only fifty-seven scientists in one American university.

xx

Introduction

attention once more to the reciprocal relations between the social structure
of science and scientific knowledge. The point will be taken up in more
detail below.
Following the 1942 paper on the norms of science, there was a hiatus
of about seven years in Merton's publications in the sociology of science,
strictly conceived 19-and there were few major contributions to the field
from anyone else until 1952, when Bernard Barber's influential Science
and the Social Order was published (with a foreword of considerable interest by Merton). Well before then, however, he had identified science
as a special focus of interest within the sociology of knowledge. Certainly
his analysis of Mannheim's work in "Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of
Knowledge," appearing in 1941, exhibits intensive study of the topic,
which was to lead to his more comprehensive discussion of the entire field
in 1945 (reprinted here as "Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge").
Indeed, his interest in the social matrix of knowledge can be traced further
back, to an article on "social time" published with Sorokin in 1937, which
explores the question of how social processes influence the concepts and
measurement of time.
The paper on Mannheim highlighted a number of unresolved difficulties
in the study of how (and to what extent) existential conditions shape
men's "knowledge" (which, for Mannheim, often seemed to include "every
type of assertion and every mode of thought from folkloristic maxims to
rigorous science"), but concluded with the courteous expectation that
much enlightenment would be forthcoming from Mannheim's further explorations of the subject.
By 1945 Merton's dissatisfaction with the field was more clearly evident,
and he undertook to chart some new directions through which further
progress might be possible. It was at this point, too, that a separate chain
of interests, also dating back to his years at Harvard, began to link with
his interest in the sociology of knowledge. He had already worked with
the general idea that available knowledge involves specifiable gaps in
coping with social reality, developing it in various ways through his discussion in "The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action"
(1936), through the seminal paper "Social Structure and Anomie" (1938),
19. During this period, however, Merton did deal with various problems and conceptions relating to the sociology of science. For example: "The Role of the Intellectual in Public Bureaucracy" (1945), dealing with organizational constraints on policyoriented knowledge; "The Machine, the Worker and the Engineer" (1947), treating
the problem of the "rationalized abdication of social responsibilities" by technologists; "The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy" ( 1948), with its implications for social epistemology; "Election Polling Forecasts and Public Images of Social Science" (with
Paul Hatt, 1949), examining a special case of failed claims to knowledge affecting
the public standing of science; and "Patterns of Influence" (1949), with its concepts
of local and cosmopolitan influentials.

Introduction

xxi

and through the concept of latent dysfunctions. Although the topic could
be viewed as a distinctive problem within the sociology of knowledge, it
obviously had implications far beyond those evident in contemporary
"mainstream" works in the field.
The next several years were a kind of harvest-time during which Merton
brought to fruition a number of related interests-disparate though they
may have appeared to others. Apart from his continuing codification of
functional analysis during this period, which provided the theoretical background for his empirical interests, Merton was evidently centrally concerned with the various relationships that may exist between "knowledge"
and "reality," and he worked on several subjects that served as what
he describes as "strategic research sites" for the investigation of these
relationships.
Studies in public opinion and personal influence, carried out with Paul
F. Lazarsfeld in the Bureau of Applied Social Research of Columbia
University, fitted in directly with the 1945 paradigm: the question of the
social bases of knowledge was operationalized in empirical research on
sources of people's decision-oriented knowledge. At the same time, exceptions to the postulate of "class-based consciousness" could be studied in
the relationships between group membership and attitudes and could be
partly accounted for in terms of a developing reference group theory. 20
The problem of how a member of the bourgeoisie could develop an active
concern for the rights of the proletariat, for example, or how a member
of the proletariat could maintain a "false consciousness" all his life, had
been a major stumbling block in attempts to identify the social bases of
knowledge; but once it was reconceptualized in terms of reference groups,
it became amenable to systematic research.
March and Simon21 have traced what they describe as the "Merton
model" of bureaucracy focused on unanticipated organizational consequences as it was substantially developed in a series of outstanding empirical studies by graduates of the Columbia department (Selznick, Gouldner,
Blau, Lipset, Trow, and Coleman). This model provided opportunity to
wrestle with the problems that appear when "knowledge" (in this case,
as exhibited in the formal structure and goals of a bureaucracy) is given
and organizational "reality" (empirical patterns of interaction within the
bureaucracy) becomes the dependent variable. Here social reality is adjusting (and reacting) to knowledge-in contrast to science, where knowledge must eventually be adjusted to fit reality.
20. See, for instance, Robert K. Merton and Alice S. Rossi, "Contributions to the
Theory of Reference Group Behavior," and Robert K. Merton, "Continuities in the
Theory of Reference Groups and Social Structure."
21. James G. March and Herbert A. Simon, Organizations (New York: Wiley,
1958), chapter 3.

xxii

Introduction

The problem of adult socialization-including the processes through

which the value-pervaded knowledge held by post-adolescents may be
significantly altered by intensive exposure to a new set of "conditions"was explored in research reported in The Student-Physician (1957), although Merton now maintains that a medical school was not a strategic
research site for investigation of this general problem since the high degree
of self-selection by students for this career reduced variability and limited
the opportunity to uncover the bases and processes of change in their
values and attitudes.
"The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy" ( 1948) represented yet another focus
on the relationship between knowledge and reality, centering on the way
in which emergent social reality is shaped by prior expectations and the
conditions under which this occurs. Here the orientation deals with the
role of ideas in the construction of social reality rather than with the social
construction of knowledge.
But this is not the place to consider Merton's contributions to these
several areas of research. It is enough to note that his foreword to Barber's
Science and the Social Order is largely a rueful consideration of why the
sociology of science had remained so conspicuously underdeveloped-even
undeveloped-despite its promise as a field in which significant questions
could be asked and answers to them found through empirical research.
In this essay (reprinted here as "The Neglect of the Sociology of Science")
he stops short of recommending this apparent paradox as itself a legitimate
object of attention for the sociologist of science-but the implication is
clearly there and may be taken as an early recognition of the peculiarly
reflexive nature of the field 22 which was noted at the beginning of this
introduction.
The foreword also notes a quickening of interest in the field and, perhaps
based on the sociological understanding of science (at the intuitive if not
the explicitly theoretical level), makes the forecast that under identifiable
and probable conditions the field will soon attract the attention of more
sociologists. It was nearly ten years before this forecast began to come
true in any substantial form, but the insight that "when something is widely
defined as a social problem in modern Western society, it becomes a proper
object for study," and the sense that science was rapidly being defined in
just this way, can be traced back to Merton's paper "Science and the
Social Order" in 1937.
22. For discussion of Merton's formulations of "reflexive predictions" in his "SelfFulfilling Prophecy," see May Brodbeck, ed., Readings in the Philosophy of the
Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 436-47; on self-exemplifying
theories in the sociology of science, see "Insiders and Outsiders" in this volume, and
Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants (1965); on "reflexive total relativism" in sociology, see his paper, "The Precarious Foundations of Detachment in Sociology,"
(1971).

Introduction

xxiii

It can be argued, though, that another element would be necessary

before one could count on a blossoming of sociological interest in science.
What was still to be achieved was, briefly, the development of a coherent
theoretical orientation to science as a social phenomenon-what Merton
described as an "analytical paradigm," capable of generating obvious, researchable questions and suggesting criteria by which answers could be
evaluated. There are glimmerings, in the foreword, of what would be
needed. Merton had already outlined the normative structure of science
and had suggested how the four norms interact with each other in a
functioning whole. But there was no clearly defined, distinctive source of
"energy" in the system-no sense of why it should "move." The formulation was a state description rather than a process description. It was as if
someone had described the physical construction of an electric motor but
had not brought to it a clear concept of electricity; one could see what it
might do, but could not understand why it should go round and round.
In his dissertation and in several subsequent papers, Merton had noted
the often-recognized phenomenon of multiple discovery in science, and
also the commemorative use of eponymy. He remarked on it again in the
foreword to Barber's work, almost as though he knew there was additional
significance to be drawn from it. This was to be another piece of the puzzle
to be found and fitted into place, but it would be five years before his
presidential address to the American Sociological Society would exploit
its full meaning and cement this piece securely where we see it belonged.
This was the conception that the institutionally reinforced drive for professional recognition, acquired almost exclusively in return for priority
in scientific contributions and symbolized in the upper reaches of discovery
by eponymy, constitutes the normatively prescribed reward for scientific
achievement and thus the basis for a self-contained reward system of
science.
Here was the energy that would drive the system, the distinctively institutionalized motivation that could account for scientists' orientations to
the ethos of science and for their willingness to accept its often demanding
strictures. (The norms of communism or communality and of disinterestedness seem obviously contrary to the workaday norms of an acquisitive, capitalistic Western civilization; and while universalism is an ideal
of this civilization, even though it is more frequently breached than
honored, to practice organized skepticism seriously often evokes public
hostility by putting into question sacred verities of nature and society.)
The idea of an institutionally derived or reinforced individual need,
linked directly to scientific accomplishment, also supplied a kind of urgency to the doing of science that had not been explained in earlier conceptions of science. Scientific knowledge is, in one sense, timeless. We are
in the habit of writing "Aristotle says," and "Newton points out," and

xxiv

Introduction

there is a widespread Platonic assumption that all the ideas of science

coexist somewhere in a realm without clocks or calendars. Why, then,
should a scientist ever be in a hurry to complete his work? Why should
he feel obliged to rush into print to point out a colleague's error or to
defend the validity of his own work when, under the optimistic assumptions of a positivistic outlook, sooner or later these perturbations in the
path toward Truth would be straightened out anyway? The direct link
between priority and recognition provided the outline of an answer.
We cannot, of course, be certain that the growth of the sociology of
science had been hampered by the lack of a sufficiently apt "handle" by
which it could be grasped and made to yield meaningful research questions. Perhaps it would have blossomed just as surely in the late 1950s
even without this particular contribution, as a result of accretion of the
factors Merton had noted in 1952. It is possible, too, that the position
Merton had achieved within sociology by 1957 would have been sufficient
to get the field going. The second edition of his Social Theory and Social
Structure had just appeared and was widely taken to represent the best in
modern American sociology; the prominence that "Priorities in Scientific
Discovery" received because it was the presidential address (and thus
achieved rapid publication in the American Sociological Review) must
have added substantially to its impact, over and above that which it could
rightfully claim on scholarly grounds alone.
Whatever the actual or most important reason for the rapid development of the sociology of science as a specialty after 1957 may have
been, we can be sure that this fundamental formulation of the nature of
the reward system of science was of critical importance in shaping the
direction in which it evolved. The neat dovetailing of a functionally analyzed normative structure with an appropriately unique "scientific motivation" provided a paradigm (in the Mertonian sense) which opened the
door to a wide range of meaningful research problems.
In the same year, the advent of Sputnik I and the ensuing "crisis" in
American science and science education finally completed the definition
of science as a "social problem." It had been progressively identified as a
moral problem since at least Hiroshima, but apparently the problem had
to be "practical" before the society could in effect treat it as a sphere of
society and culture requiring intensive examination. As one offshoot, it
became an area in which sociologists could legitimately specialize, with
support slowly becoming available for its investigation. This is not to say
that the sociological study of science had been entirely ignored before
1957, or that Merton's work set the tone for all studies of science thereafter. There had been a slowly growing stream of studies of scientists
in organizations since the early 1950s, originating in the areas of manage-

Introduction

xxv

ment and industrial sociology, but a perceptible blending of this more

practical, management-oriented tradition with the more theoretical Mertonian approach did not occur until after 1960.
The "organizational" study of scientists in the United States began in
the early 1950s with the large-scale investigation of a government laboratory by Pelz and his associates and has continued ever since. 28 This and
other works-published during the same period and later by Bennis; Gordon, Marquis, and Anderson; Kaplan; Kornhauser; Marcson; Shepard;24
and others-focused largely on the problems of researchers' morale and
productivity (and on the management of research in industrial research
laboratories so as to enhance their work-satisfactions), particularly when
their work was administered by nonscientists. The sociological questions
posed came largely from the areas of bureaucracy and industrial sociology,
and it was several years before the two separate research traditions were
able to profit from each other.
An early conjunction of them came in the work of Barney G. Glaser,
whose dissertation at Columbia in the early 1960s was based on a reanalysis of the original Pelz data and made effective use of the need for
professional recognition in exploring some of the factors that shape the
organizational careers of scientists. 25
After this, three dissertations were written at Columbia under Merton's
direction, appearing every other year, and their authors have continued
to make substantial contributions to the field. Harriet Zuckerman's study
of Nobel Prize winners became her dissertation in 1965,26 and she has
remained at Columbia as Merton's chief collaborator. Stephen Cole received his doctorate in 1967, and, from his present position at SUNYStony Brook, he has continued to participate in the work of the Columbia
23. For one overview, see Donald C. Pelz and Frank M. Andrews, Scientists in
Organizations (New York: John Wiley, 1966). On similar research in Europe, see
Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, Science and Society (London: Allen Lane, Penguin
Press, 1969); and Stephen Cotgrove and Steven Box, Science, Industry and Society:
Studies in the Sociology of Science (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970).
24. Representative publications include: Warren G. Bennis, "Values and Organizations in a University Social Research Group," American Sociological Review 21
(1956): 555-63; Gerald Gordon, Sue Marquis, and 0. W. Anderson, "Freedom and
Control in Four Types of Scientific Settings," The American Behavioral Scientist 6
( 1962): 39-42; Norman Kaplan, "Professional Scientists in Industry: An Essay Review," Social Problems 13 ( 1965): 88-97; William Kornhauser, Scientists in Industry
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953); Simon Marcson, The Scientist in
American Industry (Princeton, N.J.: Industrial Relations Section, Princeton University, 1960); Herbert A. Shepard, "Nine Dilemmas in Industrial Research," Administrative Science Quarterly 1 (1956): 295-309.
25. The work is reported in Barney G. Glaser, Organizational Scientists: Their
Professional Careers (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964).
26. An outgrowth of this study will appear in her Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates
in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, in press).

xxvi

Introduction

group. Jonathan Cole, Stephen's younger brother, completed his degree

in 1969 and has also remained at Columbia. 27 Diana Crane (Herve) took
her degree at Columbia, and although her dissertation was not directed by
Merton, her research at Yale (where she worked with Derek J. de Solla
Price and advised Jerry D. Gaston during the early stages of his study of
the British physics community) and later at The Johns Hopkins University, blends well with the Mertonian approach. 28
During this crucial decade and earlier, Merton's influence was by no
means limited to the Columbia campus. Warren 0. Hagstrom, who had
worked at Berkeley with William Kornhauser on his 1962 study, Scientists
in Industry, published The Scientific Community29 in 1965. This is a detailed investigation of the internal social nature of science which, as he
notes, drew very heavily upon the Mertonian paradigm. Working at Wisconsin since that time, Hagstrom has continued research in the sociology
of science. The editor's own dissertation, directed by Norman Kaplan at
Cornell (Kaplan had been a student of Merton in the early 1950s, but in
the area of professions rather than the sociology of science as such), 30
was completed in 1960 and resulted later in an attempt to synthesize the
Mertonian paradigm more completely which appeared as The Social System of Science 31 some years later.
A rather different focus of interest, developing out of public opinion
studies in the late 1950s, was concerned with communication among
scientists. 32 Herbert Menzel pioneered in this field while at the Bureau
of Applied Social Research at Columbia; although he was in contact with
Merton, the details of communication patterns in science did not at first
seem to call for the broad perspective supplied by the paradigm, and it
27. Some of the Coles' work is synthesized in Jonathan Cole and Stephen Cole,
Social Stratification in Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
28. See Diana Crane, "Social Structure in a Group of Scientists: A Test of the
'Invisible College' Hypothesis," American Sociological Review 34 (1969): 345-51.
29. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1965.
30. In his preface to Science and Society (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965), Norman Kaplan nevertheless reports that "my own interest in the sociology of science
first began to develop in a seminar I had with Professor Robert K. Merton at Columbia University nearly two decades ago." For his overview of the field through the
early 1960s, see Norman Kaplan, "The Sociology of Science," in Robert E. L. Faris,
ed., Handbook of Modern Sociology (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964 ), pp. 852-81.
31. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. On a special problem in the
field, see also Norman W. Storer, "Relations Among Scientific Disciplines," in Saad
Z. Nagi and Ronald G. Corwin, eds., Social Contexts of Research (New York: Wiley,
1972), pp. 229-68.
32. For overviews of research on scientific communication, see William J. Paisley,
The Flow of (Behavorial) Science Information: A Review of the Research Literature
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Institute for Communication Research, 1965), and "Information Needs and Uses," in Carlos Cuadra, ed., Annual Review of Information
Science and Technology, vol. 3 (1968).

Introduction

xxvii

was not until these patterns were seen as fundamental to the development
of new scientific specialties and not until the latent functions of planned
communication came into focus that an explicit linkage was formed. 33
Crane's Invisible Colleges 34 brings the two interests together very effectively, and Nicholas C. Mullins' 1966 dissertation at Harvard, "Social
Networks Among Biological Scientists," represents an independent approach to the problem. 35
Another important source of information on the flow of communication
in science was the American Psychological Association's project on communication among psychologists. This developed an extensive array of
data during the 1960s, under the direction of William Garvey and Belver
C. Griffith. Garvey then moved to Johns Hopkins, where the Center for
Research in Scientific Communication undertook a notable series of studies
of communication during and after the annual meetings of a number of
scientific and technological associations. 36 These studies tended to be long
on data and relatively short on theory, but they have proven to be quite
compatible with questions derived from the paradigm. Griffith, now at
the Drexel Institute, has also continued to study the communications and
invisible colleges of scientists.
Three additional lines of development in the United States, largely independent of the Mertonian tradition and yet generally complementary,
should be noted here. Joseph Ben-David, working partly at Chicago and
partly at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has produced since 1960 a
series of important papers on the relation of different forms of academic
organization to scientific developments, culminating in his recent important analysis of the growth of science in Western civilization since the time
33. Herbert Menzel, "The Flow of Information Among Scientists: Problems, Opportunities, and Research Questions," mimeographed (New York: Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research, 1958). On the functions of various
patterns of communication, see Herbert Menzel, "Planned and Unplanned Scientific
Communication," in International Conference on Scientific Information, Proceedings
(Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1959), pp. 199-243. See also,
Menzel, "Scientific Communication: Five Themes from Social Research," American
Psychologist 21 (1966): 999-1004, and for other aspects of the communication
process, the other papers in the same issue of this journal.
34. Diana Crane, Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).
35. For example, see Nicholas C. Mullins, "The Distribution of Social and Cultural Properties in Informal Communication Networks among Biological Scientists,"
American Sociological Review 33 (October 1968): 786-97.
36. See, for example, the Johns Hopkins University Center for Research in Scientific Communication, "Scientific Exchange-Behavior at the 1966 Annual Meeting
of the American Sociological Association," report no. 4, Baltimore, September 1967,
pp. 209-50; and "The Dissemination of Scientific Information, Informal Interaction,
and the Impact of Information Associated with the 48th Annual Meeting of the
American Geophysical Union," report no. 5, Baltimore, October 1967, pp. 251-92.

xxviii

Introduction

of the Greeks. 37 His emphasis has been continually on the social-structural

factors that have influenced the growth or decline of science or of scientific
specialties, and in this sense he has been closer to those studying communication and invisible colleges than to those working directly from the
normative structure of science.
Trained as a historian of science, Thomas S. Kuhn has drawn ever
closer to the sociology of science since the appearance of his extremely
influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in 1962. It is
from this book that the term paradigm has gained its present currency,
even though the concept had, of course, been employed in a less general
sense much earlier (e.g., in Merton's 1945 review of the sociology of
knowledge and in his analysis, four years later, of the functions of paradigms as distinct from theories). 38 In contrast to Ben-David, Kuhn's emphasis is on the substantive content of science-with how changes in the
focus and organization of scientific knowledge come about. But more than
most historian-philosophers of science, he has dealt with the social structure of "the scientific community" as basic to the operation of paradigms
and, more generally, to the development of science. When the central
elements of a body of knowledge are fairly stable and widely accepted (as,
for instance, was the case with Newtonian physics between 1700 and
1900), a paradigm exists, and research on the questions that flow naturally
from this basic definition of a discipline's work is called "normal science."
A scientific revolution, then, occurs when the coherence of this paradigm
breaks down under an accumulation of new theories, new questions, and
new data which throw its validity into doubt, and a new paradigm develops
in its place.
It is explicitly with Kuhn's work in mind that some of Merton's recent
critics such as Mulkay and King have suggested that he has erred in not
taking more direct account of the substantive content of science in his
own formulations. These criticisms, however, seldom refer to any of Merton's work since 1957 and (with the exception of the difficulties over the
"reality" of the norms of science, to which Kuhn's ideas provide a useful
resolution) may be characterized as belatedly premature. To say nothing
of the earlier work on the foci of attention in science, the fact is that
Merton and his colleagues at Columbia have been working on problems
at the interface of the social structure and cognitive structure of sciencethat is, the grounds on which it is organized and the forms and extent of
37. Ben-David, The Scientist's Role in Society. References to Ben-David's earlier
work, including papers with associates such as Randall Collins and A. Zloczower,
can be found in his book.
38. As noted by Robert W. Friedrichs in his discussion of paradigms and exemplars: "Dialectical Sociology: An Exemplar for the 1970s," Social Forces 50
( 1972): 447-55. For Merton's account of the uses of paradigms, see Social Theory
and Social Structure, 1968 edition, pp. 69-72.

Introduction

xxix

consensus and dissensus that attend various aspects of claims to knowledge

under different circumstances.
A third line of development has been vigorously explored by Derek J.
de Solla Price, the historian of science at Yale, who has become more and
more sociologically oriented over the past two decades. Since 1951 he has
been increasingly concerned with the quantification of broad parameters
of world science, as evidenced by topics dealt with in his Science Since
Babylon and Little Science, Big Science: growth rates since 1600 (in numbers of scientists and scientific discoveries, new journals and societies, and
gross publications per year); patterns of national investment in research
and development (which he finds to equal roughly .07 percent of all countries' gross national product, regardless of size or level of economic development); and various aspects of communication. 39 Price also introduced
the seventeenth-century term invisible colleges in its present conceptual
sense-informal clusters of scientists collaborating at newly developing
research frontiers-and has been highly effective in demonstrating the
importance of the Science Citation Index in tracing the give-and-take between national science communities and in assessing the intellectual influence of specific scientific writings over time.
Price's work has thus served largely to establish some of the demographic and other "material" parameters of the scientific community over
time and has not had occasion to tackle problems to which the Mertonian
paradigm would be directly relevant. Two indirect linkages exist, however
-through his work on invisible colleges, a topic with which Diana Crane
has been effectively concerned, and through his encouragement of the use
of the Science Citation Index as a research tool; both Price and Merton
are members of the SCI Advisory Board, and the Columbia group, notably
Stephen and Jonathan Cole, has made intensive systematic use of science
citations.
Work in the sociology of science outside the United States has lately
acquired impressive momentum, and no effort is made here to catalogue
even its principal contributions to the field. A short, obviously incomplete
inventory must suffice. There have been founded in Britain a science
studies unit at the University of Edinburgh, under the direction of David
0. Edge, and a program in the history and social studies of science at the
University of Sussex, under the guidance of Roy M. MacLeod and, in
science policy studies, Christopher Freeman. In 1971 MacLeod and Edge
joined forces as joint editors of Science Studies, a journal specializing in
"research in the social and historical dimensions of science and technol39. Derek J. de Solla Price, Science Since Babylon (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1961); Little Science, Big Science (New York: Columbia University Press,
1963); and among his many papers, "Nations Can Publish or Perish," International
Science and Technology 70 (October 1967): 84-89.

xxx

Introduction

ogy." Others are at work in the field at Leeds (J. R. Ravetz and R. G. A.
Dolby), at Cambridge (N. J. Mulkay), at London (Hilary Rose), at
Cardiff (Paul Halmos), and at Manchester (Richard D. Whitley).
In Sweden, Stevan Dedijer has assembled a research group at the University of Lund. Considerable interest in the sociology of science exists in
the Soviet Union as A. Zvorikin and S. R. Mikulinskii, among others,
testify, with the work of Gennady Dobrov at Kiev being along the lines
developed by Derek Price in this country. Increasing interest in the field
has been evidenced by social scientists in Poland, where years ago, in the
mid-1930s, Maria Ossowka and Stanislaw Ossowski introduced the "science
of science"; in Czechoslovakia where the Academy of Sciences has coordinated disciplinary work on the social and human implications of
science and technology; in France, in the work of such men as JeanJacques Salomon, Serge Moscovici, and Bernard Lecuyer (whose work in
the sociology of science, chiefly under the guidance of Paul Lazarsfeld,
began in a joint seminar given by Lazarsfeld and Merton); and in Germany, Israel, Holland, Japan, and an array of other countries. A number of
important investigations have been carried out by UNESCO and the Union
Intemationale d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences in Paris, and a
Research Committee on the Sociology of Science has been established by
the International Sociological Association. Any comprehensive survey of
the present state of the sociology of science that examined the contributions
of these groups would surely conclude that it is becoming less and less an
American specialty.
Since the emergence of the Mertonian paradigm in the early 1960s,
most research in the field appears to fit Kuhn's definition of "normal science." Not only Merton's own work but that of many others in the field
have focused primarily on problems which, once elucidated, tum out to be
directly relevant to questions explicit or implicit in the paradigm. In short,
the sociology of science has matured to the point where much research
involves "puzzle-solving." As Kuhn emphasizes,40 to describe research as
"puzzle-solving" does not imply that it falls short of being imaginative,
satisfying, or important. Filling out the areas which a paradigm can only
identify-what Merton has described as "specified ignorance"-is as
necessary to the development of scientific knowledge as is the scientific
revolution; without the yin of normal science, there would be no basis for
the yang of scientific revolution-and the latter is comparatively rare.
As the five divisions of this volume indicate, several fundamental questions generated by the paradigm have led to substantial research. For
example, the effort to work out a comprehensive concept of the reward
system in science-in part by intensively investigating the meanings in40. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, chapter 4.

Introduction

xxxi

volved in the quest for priority-helped to focus attention on how professional recognition is achieved in science and to indicate how the reward
system is linked to the normative structure. Further related to this line
of investigation are the social organization and processes of evaluation
that are seen as central to science as an intellectual enterprise. This leads
to research on such empirical problems as the ways in which the quality
of scientific contributions is assessed and the general adequacy or inadequacy of this process in facilitating the equitable allocation of rewards
for these contributions. Finally, as we have seen, problems of this sort
have led to closer scrutiny of the criteria by which scientific excellence is
determined and to an explicit consideration of the intellectual variables
involved: the degree of consensus that exists in a given discipline and
several aspects of the organization of its body of knowledge.
There is no completely satisfactory way to close this introduction, for
the field described here which Merton and others have thus far advanced
is still in a stage of rapid expansion. Presented here are many of the
foundation stones of the sociology of science as it is presently constituted,
together with numerous examples of work on questions built upon this
foundation. One of the facts that is lost when one categorizes all science
as "normal" or "revolutionary," however, is that the shape of the paradigms-the facets prominent at a given time-changes as "normal" questions are solved and new ones take their place. Such changes hardly
constitute a revolution, any more than the invasion of a new type of tree
changes the essential character of a forest, but those of us in the midst of
the forest may look forward to different foci of attention and to different
research methods and data as this particular forest continues to flourish.
For all of this, the enduring value of the papers collected here cannot
be mistaken. It will be several decades at least before the Whiteheadian
maxim, "A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost," has any
relevance at all to the sociology of science-and the editor mentions this
only as a bet-hedging counter to his own conviction that these papers will
not lose their basic value so long as the perspectives of sociology are
applied to any science, including itself.
NORMAN

W.

STORER

The
Sociology of
Knowledge

Part

Prefatory Note
The five papers comprising part one
delineate Merton's continuing interest in the sociology of knowledge,
and the dates of their appearance
attest to the fruitful reciprocity
between work in that field and in
the sociology of science. Since
"knowledge" is more inclusive than
"scientific knowledge," the latter
must constitute the more specialized
focus of attention; one conclusion
that can be drawn from these (and
other) papers is that Merton has
been at pains since the first of his
work to keep the distinction aud
connection between the two explicit
and analytically useful.
The papers are arranged here,
without regard for chronology, to
trace a line of thought that extends
from a concern with pure theory
to a vivid awareness of the concrete
moral dilemmas faced by individual
men aud women of knowledge.
After all, it is not often the case
that scholars and scientists see,
from the outset, all of the phases
in a developing line of reasoning
and then focus on each one in logical
sequence. Rather, the stages are
''filled in" as occasion aud opportunity allow, and it is the task of
hindsight to discern the underlying
order that knits them together.
The section begins with Merton's
examination of the condition of
the sociology of knowledge circa
1945, in which he argues that its
fixation on the one problem of
the "existential basis of mental

The Sociology of Knowledge

productions" leads to an impasse. The essay still stands as a landmark in

the field, and it was perhaps fitting that it should come just after World
War II, at a time when new perspectives were emerging in much of social
science. A program for relating philosophical conceptions of the sources
of knowledge in society to the empirical investigation of specified problems
is sketched out in the explicit "paradigm" laid out early in the essay.
Merton himself, in fact, had an identifiable part in the process he describes
in the last paragraph (perhaps as much an effort to induce a self-fulfilling
prophecy as to picture contemporary reality) : ". . . the sociology of
knowledge is fast outgrowing a prior tendency to confuse provisional
hypothesis with unimpeachable dogma; the plenitude of speculative insights
which marked its early stages are now being subjected to increasingly
rigorous test." Among the first fruits of such an orientation were Merton's
introduction of the concepts of "local and cosmopolitan influentials," 1
subsequently adapted by Gouldner2 in the academic realm; the Merton
and Kitt 3 "contributions to reference group theory" based on findings
reported in Stouffer et al., The American Soldier (1949) and Merton's
"continuities in reference group theory." 4 As was noted by Herbert H.
Hyman, 5 the social scientist who had introduced the concept of "reference
groups" years before, these writings systematized problems and ideas that
deal with the role of nonmembership reference groups in shaping values
and intellectual perspectives.
The next paper, on Znaniecki's book, The Social Role of the Man of
Knowledge, is one of those widely appreciated commentaries in which
Merton goes well beyond the role of passive responder to elucidate the
book's central points and to place them provocatively within a broader
sociological framework. Here the focus is entirely theoretical and atemporal, so that the categorization of the various roles playe<;l by scholars and
scientists and the winnowing out of researchable hypotheses give the paper
enduring value. It also holds interest for the historian of ideas in its outline
1. Robert K. Merton, "Patterns of Influence: A Study of Interpersonal Influence
and of Communications Behavior in a Local Community," in Paul F. Lazarsfeld and
Frank Stanton, eds., Communications Research 1948-49 (New York: Harper, 1949),
and in Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (1949; rev. ed., N.Y.: The Free
Press, 1968).
2. Alvin W. Gouldner, "Cosmopolitans and Locals: Toward an Analysis of Latent
Social Roles," Administrative Science Quarterly 2 (December 1957 and March 1958):
281-306, 444-80.
3. Robert K. Merton and Alice Kitt (Rossi), "Contributions to the Theory of
Reference Group Behavior," in Robert K. Merton and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Continuities in Social Research (N.Y.: The Free Press, 1950), and in Social Theory and
Social Structure.
4. Robert K. Merton, "Continuities in the Theory of Reference Groups and
Social Structure," in Social Theory and Social Structure.
5. Herbert H. Hyman, "Reference Groups," in David L. Sills, ed., International
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 13: 353-61.

Prefatory Note

of an analytical approach that would later be embodied in the "paradigm

for the sociology of knowledge." To reiterate a point made above, the path
of theoretical development that can be traced out well after a series of
interrelated papers has appeared need not reflect their chronology; it is as
though the theoretical progression exists in two dimensions and the scholar
in a third, for he is free to move back and forth along this line of
development as opportunities present themselves, with little regard for the
logic inherent in the theory itself.
In the following paper, "Social Conflict over Styles of Sociological
Work," Merton still finds insufficient "sustained and methodical investigation" in the sociology of knowledge, some sixteen years after he had
hopefully noted its acceleration. The paper was originally presented at the
Fourth World Congress of Sociology in 1959 at Stresa, Italy, which was
devoted to the theme of "the Sociology of Sociology." (This is a special
topic within the sociology of science that occasionally threatens, quite
naturally, to run away with sociologists' interests. However, Merton takes
the sociological community as partly representative of scholarly communities in general rather than simply as an arena in which to present practical
advice for practicing sociologists.) The focus is on the ways in which
relationships among sociologists may be as important in shaping their
shared body of knowledge as are new data and new theoretical perspectives.
For the most part, Merton manages to keep his attention focused on those
aspects of intradisciplinary conflicts which are parallelled by similar
phenomena in other disciplines at a comparable stage of development,
rather than succumbing to the familiar and distracting theme of the
peculiar vulnerability of sociologists to involvement in the ideological
concerns of the larger society.
The next paper, "Technical and Moral Dimensions of Policy Research"
(1949), together with the related pages drawn from Mass Persuasion
( 1946), moves on from the relationships between scientists to another
problem in the sociology of knowledge. This analyzes the conflict between
the demands of technique and morality to which social scientists, especially
those engaged in policy-oriented research, are often subject. It examines
the conditions leading social scientists to become "routinized in the role
of [a] bureaucratic technician" who "does not question policies, state
problems and formulate alternatives." Merton expressly rejects "the standpoint of the positivist," observing that "the investigator may naively
suppose that he is engaged in the value-free activity of research, whereas
in fact he may simply have so defined his research problems that the
results will be of use to one group in the society, and not to others. His
very choice and definition of a problem reflect his tacit values."
These writings take on an added interest in view of recent vagaries in
the history of sociological ideas. Clearly, they nullify some current asser-

The Sociology of Knowledge

tions 6 that Merton is essentially a positivist, concerned only with the

technical aspects of knowledge. Moreover, as Lord Simey has noted/
Merton went beyond theoretical and empirical analysis in a subsequent
paper with Daniel Lerner-"Social Scientists and Research Policy" (in
The Policy Sciences, 1951 )-to argue that social scientists have a
normative obligation to assert their scholarly values against the shortrange and self-interested objectives often found in research requests coming
from policy makers. This suggests that the current discovery of such
problems and perspectives in "the New Sociology" may rather be a
reaffirmation under social conditions now more propitious to such views
than before; in fact, the "cryptomnesia" (see the last paper in section 4
of this volume) suffered by successive generations of social scientists on
this subject is itself a specific problem for the sociology of knowledge.
The last paper in this section links up with the first, published a
quarter-century before. It examines in broad perspective the problem of the
existential bases of knowledge in the social sciences as this was set out
in the paradigm for the sociology of knowledge and in "continuities in the
theory of reference groups." Immediately occasioned by the rise in
collective consciousness of ethnic, racial, and other identities, the central
question of whether "only blacks can understand blacks" or "only women
can understand women" is generalized into a crucial issue in the sociology
of knowledge. The issue is this: whether monopolistic or privileged access
to knowledge, or exclusion from it, derives from one's group membership
or social position. Merton systematically dissects the general problem
into its component issues and implications, staying carefully in touch with
the social structural concomitants of each one. He reminds us that such
claims, growing out of a burgeoning ethnocentrism, are by no means new:
whenever different sectors of a society, or subcultures within it, find themselves in full-scale ideological conflict, such claims are bound to arise.
A coordinate prediction, made obvious by the very appearance of this
paper, would be that the sociology of knowledge itself is likely to
experience spurts of growth shortly after such problems come to centerstage within the intellectual community.
N. W.S.
6. See, for instance, M. D. King, "Reason, Tradition and the Progressiveness of
Science," History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 10 ( 1971): 3-32.
7. T. S. Simey, Social Science and Social Purpose (London: Constable and Co.,
1968), pp. 59-62, 178-80.

Paradigm
for the
Sociology of
Knowledge
1945

The last generation has witnessed the emergence of a special field of

sociological inquiry: the sociology of knowledge ( W issenssoziologie). The
term "knowledge" must be interpreted very broadly indeed, since studies
in this area have dealt with virtually the entire gamut of cultural products
(ideas, ideologies, juristic and ethical beliefs, philosophy, science, technology). But whatever the conception of knowledge, the orientation of this
discipline remains largely the same: it is primarily concerned with the
relations between knowledge and other existential factors in the society or
culture. General and even vague as this formulation of the central purpose
may be, a more specific statement will not serve to include the diverse
approaches which have been developed.
Manifestly, then, the sociology of knowledge is concerned with problems
that have had a long history. So much is this the case, that the discipline
has found its first historian, Ernst Gruenwald. 1 But our primary concern
is not with the many antecedents of current theories. There are indeed few
present-day observations which have not found previous expression in
suggestive aper~us. King Henry IV was being reminded that "Thy wish
was father, Harry, to that thought" only a few years before Bacon was
writing that "The human understanding is no dry light but receives an
Originally published as "Sociology of Knowledge," in Georges Gurvitch and Wilbert E. Moore, eds., Twentieth-Century Sociology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1945), pp. 366-405. Reprinted with permission.
1. Nothing will be said of this history in this paper. Ernst Gruenwald provides a
sketch of the early developments, at least from the so-called era of Enlightenment in
Das Problem der Soziologie des Wissens (Vienna-Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumueller,
1934). For a survey, see H. Otto Dahlke, "The Sociology of Knowledge," in H. E.
Barnes, Howard Becker, and Frances B. Becker, eds., Contemporary Social Theory
(New York: Appleton-Century, 1940), pp. 64-89.

The Sociology of Knowledge

infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may
be called 'sciences as one would.' " And Nietzsche had set down a host of
aphorisms on the ways in which needs determined the perspectives through
which we interpret the world so that even sense perceptions are permeated
with value-preferences. The antecedents of Wissenssoziologie only go to
support Whitehead's observation that "to come very near to a true theory,
and to grasp its precise application, are two very different things, as the
history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said
before by somebody who did not discover it."
The Social Context
Quite apart from its historical and intellectual origins, there is the further
question of the basis of contemporary interest in the sociology of knowledge. As is well known, the sociology of knowledge, as a distinct discipline,
has been especially cultivated in Germany and France. Only within the
last decades have American sociologists come to devote increasing attention
to problems in this area. The growth of publications and, as a decisive test
of its academic respectability, the increasing number of doctoral dissertations in the field partly testify to this rise of interest.
An immediate and obviously inadequate explanation of this development
would point to the recent transfer of European sociological thought by
sociologists who have lately come to this country. To be sure, these scholars
were among the culture-bearers of Wissenssoziologie. But this merely
provided availability of these conceptions and no more accounts for their
actual acceptance than would mere availability in any other instance of
culture diffusion. American thought proved receptive to the sociology of
knowledge largely because it dealt with problems, concepts, and theories
that are increasingly pertinent to our contemporary social situation, because our society has come to have certain characteristics of those European societies in which the discipline was initially developed.
The sociology of knowledge takes on pertinence under a definite complex
of social and cultural conditions. 2 With increasing social conflict, differences in the values, attitudes, and modes of thought of groups develop to
the point where the orientation which these groups previously had in
common is overshadowed by incompatible differences. Not only do there
develop distinct universes of discourse, but the existence of any one
universe challenges the validity and legitimacy of the others. The coexistence of these conflicting perspectives and interpretations within the
same society leads to an active and reciprocal distrust between groups.
2. See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, pp. 5-12; Pitirim A. Sorokin, Social
and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vols. (New York: American Book Co., 1937), 2: 412-13.

Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

Within a context of distrust, one no longer inquires into the content of

beliefs and assertions to determine whether they are valid or not, one no
longer confronts the assertions with relevant evidence, but introduces an
entirely new question: how does it happen that these views are maintained?
Thought becomes functionalized; it is interpreted in terms of its psychological or economic or social or racial sources and functions. In general,
this type of functionalizing occurs when statements are doubted, when
they appear so palpably implausible or absurd or biased that one need no
longer examine the evidence for or against the statement but only the
grounds for its being asserted at all. 3 Such alien statements are "explained
by" or "imputed to" special interests, unwitting motives, distorted perspectives, social position, and so on. In folk thought, this involves reciprocal
attacks on the integrity of opponents; in more systematic thought, it leads
to reciprocal ideological analyses. On both levels, it feeds upon and nourishes collective insecurities.
Within this social context, an array of interpretations of man and culture
which share certain common presuppositions finds widespread currency.
Not only ideological analysis and Wissenssoziologie, but also psychoanalysis, Marxism, semanticism, propaganda analysis, Paretanism, and, to
some extent, functional analysis have, despite their other differences, a
similar outlook on the role of ideas. On the one hand, there is the realm
of verbalization and ideas (ideologies, rationalizations, emotive expressions,
distortions, folklore, derivations), all of which are viewed as expressive or
derivative or deceptive (of self and others), all of which are functionally
related to some substratum. On the other hand are the previously conceived
substrata (relations of production, social position, basic impulses, psychological conflict, interests and sentiments, interpersonal relations, and
residues). And throughout runs the basic theme of the unwitting determination of ideas by the substrata; the emphasis on the distinction between the
real and the illusory, between re?lity and appearance in the sphere of human
thought, belief, and conduct. And whatever the intention of the analysts,
their analyses tend to have an acrid quality: they tend to indict, secularize,
ironicize, satirize, alienate, devalue the intrinsic content of the avowed
belief or point of view. Consider only the overtones of terms chosen in
3. Freud had observed this tendency to seek out the "origins" rather than to test
the validity of statements which seem palpably absurd to us. Thus, suppose someone
maintains that the center of the earth is made of jam. "The result of our intellectual
objection will be a diversion of our interests; instead of their being directed on to the
investigation itself, as to whether the interior of the earth is really made of jam or
not, we shall wonder what kind of man it must be who can get such an idea into his
head . ..." Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures (New York: W. W. Norton,
1933), p. 49 (italics added). On the social level, a radical difference of outlook of
various social groups leads not only to ad hominem attacks, but also to "functionalized explanations."

10

The Sociology of Knowledge

these contexts to refer to beliefs, ideas, and thought: vital lies, myths,
illusions, derivations, folklore, rationalizations, ideologies, verbal fa~ade,
pseudo-reasons, and so on.
What these schemes of analysis have in common is the practice of
discounting the face value of statements, beliefs, and idea-systems by
reexamining them within a new context which supplies the "real meaning."
Statements ordinarily viewed in terms of their manifest content are debunked, whatever the intention of the analyst, by relating this content to
attributes of the speaker or of the society in which he lives. The professional iconoclast, the trained debunker, the ideological analyst and their
respective systems of thought thrive in a society where large groups of
people have already become alienated from common values; where separate
universes of discourse are linked with reciprocal distrust. Ideological
analysis systematizes the lack of faith in reigning symbols which has
become widespread; hence its pertinence and popularity. The ideological
analyst does not so much create a following as he speaks for a following
to whom his analyses "make sense," that is, conform to their previously
unanalyzed experience. 4
In a society where reciprocal distrust finds such folk-expression as
"what's in it for him?"; where "buncombe" and "bunk" have been idiom
for nearly a century and "debunk" for a generation; where advertising and
propaganda have generated active resistance to the acceptance of statements at face-value; where pseudo-Gemeinschaft behavior as a device for
improving one's economic and political position is documented in a best
seller on how to win friends who may be influenced; where social relationships are increasingly instrumentalized so that the individual comes to
view others as seeking primarily to control, manipulate, and exploit him;
where growing cynicism involves a progressive detachment from significant
group relationships and a considerable degree of self-estrangement; where
uncertainty about one's own motives is voiced in the indecisive phrase,
"I may be rationalizing, but . . . "; where defenses against traumatic
disillusionment may consist in remaining permanently disillusioned by
reducing expectations about the integrity of others through discounting
their motives and abilities in advance;-in such a society, systematic
ideological analysis and a derived sociology of knowledge take on a
4. The concept of pertinence was assumed by the Marxist harbingers of Wissenssoziologie. "The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on
ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be
universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, the actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our
very eyes" (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Karl
Marx, Selected Works, 2 vols. [Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society, 1935], 1:
219 [italics added]).

Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

11

socially grounded pertinence and cogency. And American academicians,

presented with schemes of analysis which appear to order the chaos of
cultural conflict, contending values, and points of view, have promptly
seized upon and assimilated these analytical schemes.
The "Copernican revolution" in this area of inquiry consisted in the
hypothesis that n~t only error or illusion or unauthenticated belief but also
the discovery of truth was socially (historically) conditioned. As long as
attention was focused on the social determinants of ideology, illusion,
myth, and moral norms, the sociology of knowledge could not emerge. It
was abundantly clear that in accounting for error or uncertified opinion,
some extratheoretic factors were involved, that some special explanation
was needed, since the reality of the object could not account for error.
In the case of confirmed or certified knowledge, however, it was long
assumed that it could be adequately accounted for in terms of a direct
object-interpreter relation. The sociology of knowledge came into being
with the signal hypothesis that even truths were to be held socially accountable, were to be related to the historical society in which they emerged.
To outline even the main currents of the sociology of knowledge in brief
compass is to present none adequately and to do violence to all. The
diversity of formulations-of a Marx or Scheler or Durkheim; the varying
problems-from the social determination of categorical systems to that of
class-bound political ideologies; the enormous differences in scope--from
the all-encompassing categorizing of intellectual history to the social location of the thought of Negro scholars in the last decades; the various limits
assigned to the discipline--from a comprehensive sociological epistemology
to the empirical relations of particular social structures and ideas;
the proliferation of concepts-ideas, belief-systems, positive knowledge,
thought, systems of truth, superstructure, and so on; the diverse methods
of validation-from plausible but undocumented imputations to meticulous
historical and statistical analyses-in the light of all this, an effort to deal
with both analytical apparatus and empirical studies in a few pages must
sacrifice detail to scope.
To introduce a basis of comparability among the welter of studies which
have appeared in this field, we must adopt some scheme of analysis. The
following paradigm is intended as a step in this direction. It is, undoubtedly,
a partial and, it is to be hoped, a temporary classification which will
disappear as it gives way to an improved and more exacting analytical
model. But it does provide a basis for taking an inventory of extant
findings in the field; for indicating contradictory, contrary, and consistent
results; setting forth the conceptual apparatus now in use; determining the
nature of problems which have occupied workers in this field; assessing the
character of the evidence which they have brought to bear upon these

12

The Sociology of Knowledge

problems; ferreting out the characteristic lacunae and weaknesses in current

types of interpretation. Full-fledged theory in the sociology of knowledge
lends itself to classification in terms of the following paradigm.

Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

1. Where is the existential basis of mental productions located?
a. social bases: social position, class, generation, occupational role, mode
of production, group structures (university, bureaucracy, academies, sects,
political parties), "historical situation," interests, society, ethnic affiliation,
social mobility, power structure, social processes (competition, conflict,
and so on).
b. cultural bases: values, ethos, climate of opinion, V olksgeist, Zeitgeist,
type of culture, culture mentality, Weltanschauimgen, and so on.

2. What mental productions are being sociologically analyzed?

a. spheres of: moral beliefs, ideologies, ideas, the categories of thought,
philosophy, religious beliefs, social norms, positive science, technology,
and so on.
b. which aspects are analyzed: their selection (foci of attention), level
of abstraction, presuppositions (what is taken as data and what as problematical), conceptual content, models of verification, objectives of intellectual activity, and so on.
3. How are mental productions related to the existential basis?
a. causal or functional relations: determination, cause, correspondence,
necessary condition, conditioning, functional interdependence, interaction,
dependence, and so on.
b. symbolic or organismic or meaningful relations: consistency, harmony,
coherence, unity, congruence, compatibility (and antonyms) ; expression,
realization, symbolic expression, Strukturzusammenhang, structural identities, inner connection, stylistic analogies, logicomeaningful integration,
identity of meaning, and so on.
c. ambiguous terms to designate relations: correspondence, reflection,
bound up with, in close connection with, and so on.
4. Why related? Manifest and latent functions imputed to these existentially conditioned mental productions.
a. to maintain power, promote stability, orientation, exploitation, obscure actual social relationships, provide motivation, canalize behavior,
divert criticism, deflect hostility, provide reassurance, control nature, coordinate social relationships, and so on.

5. When do the imputed relations of the existential base and knowledge

obtain?

Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

13

a. historicist theories (confined to particular societies or cultures).

b. general analytical theories.
There are, of course, additional categories for classifying and analyzing
studies in the sociology of knowledge, which are not fully explored here.
Thus, the perennial problem of the implications of existential influences
upon knowledge for the epistemological status of that knowledge has been
hotly debated from the very outset. Solutions to this problem, which
assume that a sociology of knowledge is necessarily a sociological theory
of knowledge, range from the claim that the "genesis of thought has no
necessary relation to its validity" to the extreme relativist position that
truth is "merely" a function of a social or cultural basis, that it rests solely
upon social consensus and, consequently, that any culturally accepted
theory of truth has a claim to validity equal to that of any other.
But the foregoing paradigm serves to organize the distinctive approaches
and conclusions in this field sufficiently for our purposes.
The chief approaches to be considered here are those of Marx, Scheler,
Mannheim, Durkheim, and Sorokin. Current work in this area is largely
oriented toward one or another of these theories, either through a modified
application of their conceptions or through counterdevelopments. Other
sources of studies in this field indigenous to American thought, such as
pragmatism, will be advisedly omitted, since they have not yet been
formulated with specific reference to the sociology of knowledge nor have
they been embodied in research to any notable extent.
The Existential Basis
A central point of agreement in all approaches to the sociology of knowledge is the thesis that thought has an existential basis insofar as it is
not immanently determined and insofar as one or another of its aspects
can be derived from extra-cognitive factors. But this is merely a formal
consensus, which gives way to a wide variety of theories concerning the
nature of the existential basis.
In this respect, as in others, Marxism is the storm center of Wissenssoziologie. Without entering into the exegetic problem of closely identifying
Marxism-we have only to recall Marx's "je ne suis pas Marxiste"-we
can trace out its formulations primarily in the writings of Marx and Engels.
Whatever other changes may have occurred in the development of their
theory during the half-century of their work, they consistently held fast to
the thesis that "relations of production" constitute the "real foundation"
for the superstructure of ideas. "The mode of production in material life
determines the general character of the social, political and intellectual
processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their
existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their

14

The Sociology of Knowledge

consciousness." 5 In seeking to functionalize ideas, that is, to relate the

ideas of individuals to their sociological bases, Marx locates them within
the class structure. He assumes, not so much that other influences are not
at all operative, but that class is a primary determinant and, as such, the
single most fruitful point of departure for analysis. This he makes explicit
in his first preface to Capital: " ... here individuals are dealt with only in
so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments
of particular class-relations and class-interests." 6 In abstracting from other
variables and in regarding men in their economic and class roles, Marx
hypothesizes that these roles are primary determinants and thus leaves as
an open question the extent to which they adequately account for thought
and behavior in any given case. In point of fact, one line of development
of Marxism, from the early German Ideology to the latter writings of
Engels, consists in a progressive definition (and delimitation) of the extent
to which the relations of production do in fact condition knowledge and
forms of thought.
However, both Marx and Engels, repeatedly and with increasing insistence, emphasized that the ideologies of a social stratum need not stem
only from persons who are objectively located in that stratum. As early as
the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had indicated that as the
ruling class approaches dissolution, "a small section ... joins the revolutionary class .... Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the
nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie
goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois
ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending
theoretically the historical movement as a whole." 7
Ideologies are socially located by analyzing their perspectives and presuppositions and determining how problems are construed: from the
standpoint of one or another class. Thought is not mechanistically located
by merely establishing the class position of the thinker. It is attributed to
that class for which it is "appropriate," to the class whose social situation
with its class conflicts, aspirations, fears, restraints, and objective possibilities within the given sociohistorical context is being expressed. Marx's
most explicit formulation holds:
One must not form the narrow-minded idea that the petty bourgeoisie wants
on principle to enforce an egoistic class interest. It believes, rather, that the
5. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago:
C. H. Kerr, 1904), pp. 11-12.
6. Karl Marx, Capital, 1: 15 (italics added); cf. Marx and Engels, The German
Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1939), p. 76; cf. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 205.
7. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Marx, Selected Works, 1:216
(italics added).

Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

15

special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions through which

alone modem society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Just as little
must one imagine that the democratic representatives are all shopkeepers or
are full of enthusiasm for them. So far as their education and their individual
position are concerned, they may be as widely separated from them as heaven
from earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeosie is the
fact that in their minds [im Kopfe] they do not exceed the limits which the latter
do not exceed in their life activities, that they are consequently driven to the

same problems and solutions in theory to which material interest and social
position drive the latter in practice. This is ueberhaupt, the relationship of the
political and literary representatives of a class to the class which they represent. 8

But if we cannot derive ideas from the objective class position of their
exponents, this leaves a wide margin of indeterminacy. It then becomes a
further problem to discover why some identify themselves with the characteristic outlook of the class stratum in which they objectively find themselves whereas others adopt the presuppositions of a class stratum other
than "their own." An empirical description of the fact is no adequate
substitute for its theoretical explanation.
In dealing with existential bases, Max Scheler characteristically places
his own hypothesis in opposition to other prevalent theories. 9 He draws
a distinction between cultural sociology and what he calls the sociology
of real factors (Realsoziologie). Cultural data are "ideal," in the realm of
ideas and values: "real factors" are oriented toward effecting changes in
the reality of nature or society. The former are defined by ideal goals or
intentions; the latter derive from an "impulse structure" (Triebstruktur,
for example, sex, hunger, power) . It is a basic error, he holds, of all
naturalistic theories to maintain that real factors-whether race, geopolitics, political power structure, or the relations of economic production
-unequivocally determine the realm of meaningful ideas. He also rejects
all ideological, spiritualistic, and personalistic conceptions which err in
viewing the history of existential conditions as a unilinear unfolding of the
history of mind. He ascribes complete autonomy and a determinate sequence to these real factors, though he inconsistently holds that valueladen ideas serve to guide and direct their development. Ideas as such
initially have no social effectiveness. The "purer" the idea, the greater its
8. Karl Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (Hamburg, 1885),
p. 36 (italics inserted).
9. This account is based upon Max Scheler's most elaborate discussion, "Probleme
einer Soziologie des Wissens," in his Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (Leipzig: Der Neue-Geist Verlag, 1926), pp. 1-229. This essay is an extended and improved version of an essay in his Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Wissens (Munich:
Duncker und Humblot, 1924), pp. 5-146. For further discussions of Scheler, seeP. A.
Schillp, "The Formal Problems of Scheler's Sociology of Knowledge," The Philosophical Review 36 (March 1927): 101-20; Howard Becker and H. Otto Dahlke,
"Max Scheler's Sociology of Knowledge," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2 (March 1942): 310-22.

16

The Sociology of Knowledge

impotence, so far as dynamic effect on society is concerned. Ideas do not

become actualized, embodied in cultural developments, unless they are
bound up in some fashion with interests, impulses, emotions, or collective
tendencies and their incorporation in institutional structures. 10 Only thenand in this limited respect, naturalistic theories (for example, Marxism)
are justified-do they exercise some definite influence. Should ideas not be
grounded in the immanent development of real factors, they are doomed
to become sterile Utopias.
Naturalistic theories are further in error, Scheler holds, in tacitly assuming the independent variable to be one and the same throughout history.
There is no constant independent variable but there is, in the course of
history, a definite sequence in which the primary factors prevail, a sequence
which can be summed up in a "law of three phases." In the initial phase,
blood-ties and associated kinship institutions constitute the independent
variable; later, political power and, finally, economic factors. There is,
then, no constancy in the effective primacy of existential factors but rather
an ordered variability. Thus, Scheler sought to relativize the very notion
of historical determinants. 11 He claims not only to have confirmed his law
of the three phases inductively but to have derived it from a theory of
human impulses.
Scheler's conception of Realfaktoren-race and kinship, the structure
of power, factors of production, qualitative and quantitative aspects of
population, geographical and geopolitical factors-hardly constitutes a
usefully defined category. It is of small value to subsume such diverse
elements under one rubric, and, indeed, his own empirical studies and
those of his disciples do not profit from this array of factors. But in suggesting a variation of significant existential factors, though not in the
ordered sequence which he failed to establish, he moves in the direction
which subsequent research has followed.
Thus, Mannheim derives from Marx primarily by extending his conception of existential bases. Given the fact of multiple group affiliation, the
problem becomes one of determining which of these affiliations are decisive
in fixing perspectives, models of thought, definitions of the given, and so
on. Unlike "a dogmatic Marxism," he does not assume that class position
is alone ultimately determinant. He finds, for example, that an organically
integrated group conceives of history as a continuous movement toward
the realization of its goals, whereas socially uprooted and loosely integrated
groups espouse a historical intuition which stresses the fortuitous and
imponderable. It is only through exploring the variety of group formations
10. Scheler, Die Wissensformen, pp. 7, 32.
11. Ibid., pp. 25-45. It should be noted that Marx had long since rejected out of
hand a similar conception of shifts in independent variables which was made the
basis for an attack on his Critique of Political Economy; see Capital, 1: 94n.

Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

17

-generations, status groups, sects, occupational groups-and their characteristic modes of thought that there can be found an existential basis
corresponding to the great variety of perspectives and knowledge which
actually obtain. 12
Though representing a different tradition, this is substantially the position taken by Durkheim. In an early study with Mauss of primitive forms
of classification, he maintained that the genesis of the categories of thought
is to be found in the group structure and relations and that the categories
vary with changes in the social organization. 13 In seeking to account for
the social origins of the categories, Durkheim postulates that individuals
are more directly and inclusively oriented toward the groups in which they
live than they are toward nature. The primarily significant experiences are
mediated through social relationships, which leave their impress on the
character of thought and knowledge. 14 Thus, in his study of primitive forms
of thought, he deals with the periodic recurrence of social activities (ceremonies, feasts, rites), the clan structure, and the spatial configurations of
group meetings as among the existential bases of thought. And, applying
Durkheim's formulations to ancient Chinese thought, Granet attributes
their typical conceptions of time and space to such bases as the feudal
organization and the rhythmic alternation of concentrated and dispersed
group life. 15
In sharp distinction from the foregoing conceptions of existential bases
is Sorokin's idealistic and emanationist theory, which seeks to derive every
aspect of knowledge, not from an existential social basis, but from varying
"culture mentalities." These mentalities are constructed of "major premises": thus, the ideational mentality conceives of reality as "non-material,
ever-lasting Being"; its needs as primarily spiritual and their full satisfaction through "self imposed minimization or elimination of most physical
needs." 16 Contrariwise, the sensate mentality limits reality to what can be
perceived through the senses, it is primarily concerned with physical needs
which it seeks to satisfy to a maximum, not through self-modification, but
12. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, pp. 247-48. In view of the recent extensive discussions of Mannheim's work, it will not be treated at length in this essay.
13. Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, "De quelques formes primitives de
classification," L'Annee Sociologique 6 (1901-2): 1-72: " ... even ideas as abstract
as those of time and space are, at each moment of their history, in close relation with
the corresponding social organization." As Marcel Granet has indicated, this paper
contains some pages on Chinese thought which have been held by specialists to mark
a new era in the field of sinological studies.
14. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, pp. 443-44;
see also Hans Kelsen, Society and Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1943), p. 30.
15. Marcel Granet, La pensee chinoise (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1934),
for example, pp. 84-104.
16. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, 1: 72-73.

18

The Sociology of Knowledge

through change of the external world. The chief intermediate type of mentality is the idealistic, which represents a virtual balance of the foregoing
types. It is these mentalities, that is, the major premises of each culture,
from which systems of truth and knowledge are derived. And here we
come to the self-contained emanationism of an idealistic position: it appears plainly tautological to say, as Sorokin does, that "in a sensate society
and culture the Sensate system of truth based upon the testimony of the
organs of senses has to be dominant." 17 For sensate mentality has already
been defined as one conceiving of "reality as only that which is presented
to the sense organs." 18
Moreover, an emanationist phrasing such as this bypasses some of the
basic questions raised by other approaches to the analysis of existential
conditions. Thus, Sorokin considers the failure of the sensate "system of
truth" (empiricism) to monopolize a sensate culture as evidence that the
culture is not "fully integrated." But this surrenders inquiry into the bases
of those very differences of thought with which our contemporary world
is concerned. This is true of other categories and principles of knowledge
for which he seeks to apply a sociological accounting. For example, in our
present sensate culture, he finds that "materialism" is less prevalent than
"idealism," and that "temporalism" and "eternalism" are almost equally current; so, too, with "realism" and "nominalism," "singularism" and "universalism," and so on. Since there are these diversities within a culture, the
overall characterization of the culture as sensate provides no basis for
indicating which groups subscribe to one mode of thought, and which to
another. Sorokin does not systematically explore varying existential bases
within a society or culture; he looks to the "dominant" tendencies and
imputes these to the culture as a whole. 19 Our contemporary society, quite
apart from the differences of intellectual outlook of divers classes and
groups, is viewed as an integral exemplification of sensate culture. On its
own premises, Sorokin's approach is primarily suited for an overall characterization of cultures, not for analyzing connections between varied
existential conditions and thought within a society.

Types of Knowledge
Even a cursory survey is enough to show that the term "knowledge" has
been so broadly conceived as to refer to every type of idea and every mode
17. Ibid., 2: 5.
18. Ibid., 1: 73.
19. One "exception" to this practice is found in his contrast between the prevalent
tendency of the "clergy and religious landed aristocracy to become the leading and
organizing classes in the Ideational, and the capitalistic bourgeoisie, intelligentsia,
professionals, and secular officials in the Sensate culture" (ibid., 3: 250). And see his
account of the diffusion of culture among social classes (ibid., 4: 221 ff).

Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

19

of thought ranging from folk belief to positive science. Knowledge has

often come to be assimilated to the term "culture" so that not only the
exact sciences but ethical convictions, epistemological postulates, material
predications, synthetic judgments, political beliefs, the categories of thought,
eschatological doxies, moral norms, ontological assumptions, and observations of empirical fact are more or less indiscriminately held to be "existentially conditioned."20 The question is, of course, whether these diverse
kinds of "knowledge" stand in the same relationship to their sociological
basis, or whether it is necessary to discriminate between spheres of knowledge precisely because this relationship differs for the various types. For
the most part, there has been a systematic ambiguity concerning this
problem.
Only in his later writings did Engels come to recognize that the concept
of ideological superstructure included a variety of "ideological forms"
which differ significantly, that is, are not equally and similarly conditioned
by the material basis. Marx's failure to take up this problem systematically21 accounts for much of the initial vagueness about what is comprised
by the superstructure and how these several "ideological" spheres are
related to the modes of production. It was largely the task of Engels to
attempt this clarification. In differentiating the blanket term "ideology,"
Engels granted a degree of autonomy to law.
As soon as the new division of labor which creates professional lawyers
becomes necessary, another new and independent sphere is opened up which,
for all its general dependence on production and trade, still has its own capacity for reacting upon these spheres as well. In a modern state, law must not
only correspond to the general economic position and be its expression, but
must also be an expression which is consistent in itself, and which does not,
owing to inner contradictions, look glaringly inconsistent. And in order to
achieve this, the faithful reflection of economic conditions is more and more
infringed upon. All the more so the more rarely it happens that a code of law
is the blunt, unmitigated, unadulterated expression of the domination of a
class-this in itself would already offend the "conception of justice."22
If this is true of law, with its close connection with econpmic pressures,
it is all the more true of other spheres of the "ideological superstructure."
20. Cf. R. K. Merton, "Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge," Journal
of Liberal Religion 2 (1941): 133-35; Kurt H. Wolff, "The Sociology of Knowledge:
Emphasis on an Empirical Attitude," Philosophy of Science 10 (1943): 104-23; Talcott Parsons, "The Role of Ideas in Social Action," in Essays in Sociological Theory,

chapter 6.
21. This is presumably the ground for Scheler's remark: "A specific thesis of the
economic conception of history is the subsumption of the laws of development of
all knowledge under the laws of development of ideologies." Die Wissensformen, p.
21.
22. Engels, letter to Conrad Schmidt, 27 October 1890, in Marx, Selected Works,
1: 385.

20

The Sociology of Knowledge

Philosophy, religion, science are particularly constrained by the preexisting

stock of knowledge and belief, and are only indirectly and ultimately influenced by economic factors. 23 In these fields, it is not possible to "derive"
the content and development of belief and knowledge merely from an
analysis of the historical situation:
Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development
is based on economic development. But all these react upon one another and
also upon the economic base. It is not that the economic position is the cause
and alone active, while everything else only has a passive effect. There is,
rather, interaction on the basis of the economic necessity, which ultimately
always asserts itself. 24
But to say that the economic basis "ultimately" asserts itself is to say
that the ideological spheres exhibit some degree of independent development, as indeed Engels goes on to observe: "The further the particular
sphere which we are investigating is removed from the economic sphere
and approaches that of pure abstract ideology, the more shall we find it
exhibiting accidents [that is, deviations from the "expected"] in its development, the more will its curve run in zig-zag." 25
Finally, there is an even more restricted conception of the sociological
status of natural science. In one well-known passage, Marx expressly distinguishes natural science from ideological spheres.
With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations
the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of
the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic-in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this
conflict and fight it out. 26
Thus, natural science and political economy, which can match its precision, are granted a status quite distinct from that of ideology. The conceptual content of natural science is not imputed to an economic base:
merely its "aims" and "material." "Where would natural science be without industry and commerce? Even this "pure" natural science is provided
with an aim, as with its material, only through trade and industry, through
23. Ibid., 1: 386.
24. Engels, letter to Heinz Starkenburg, 25 January 1894, ibid., 1: 392.
25. Ibid., 1: 393; cf. Engels, Feuerbach (Chicago: C. H. Kerr, 1903), pp. 117 ff.
"It is well known that certain periods of highest development of art stand in no direct
connection with the general development of society, nor with the material basis and
the skeleton structure of its organization" (Marx, introduction to Critique of Political
Economy, pp. 309-10 [italics added]).
26. Marx, Critique of Political Economy, p. 12 (italics added).

Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

21

the sensuous activity of men. " 27 Along the same lines, Engels asserts that
the appearance of Marx's materialistic conception of history was itself
determined by "necessity," as is indicated by similar views appearing
among English and French historians at the time and by Morgan's independent discovery of the same conception. 28
He goes even further to maintain that socialist theory is itself a proletarian "reflection" of modern class conflict, so that here, at least, the very
content of "scientific thought" is held to be socially determined, 29 without
vitiating its validity.
There was an incipient tendency in Marxism, then, to consider natural
science as standing in a relation to the economic base different from that
of other spheres of knowledge and belief. In science, the focus of attention
may be socially determined but not, presumably, its conceptual apparatus.
In this respect, the social sciences were sometimes held to differ significantly from the natural sciences. Social science tended to be assimilated
to the sphere of ideology, a tendency developed by later Marxists into the
questionable thesis of a class-bound social science which is inevitably tendentious30 and into the claim that only "proletarian science" has valid
insight into certain aspects of social reality. 31
Mannheim follows in the Marxist tradition to the extent of exempting
the "exact sciences" and "formal knowledge" from existential determina27. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 36 (italics added). See also
Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Chicago: C. H. Kerr, 1910), pp. 24-25,
where the needs of a rising middle class are held to account for the revival of science.
The assertion that "only" trade and industry provide the aims is typical of the extreme, and untested, statements of relationships which prevail especially in the early
Marxist writings. Such terms as "determination" cannot be taken at their face value;
they are characteristically used very loosely. The actual extent of such relationships
between intellectual activity and the material foundations were not investigated by
either Marx or Engels.
28. Engels, in Marx, Selected Works, 1: 393. The occurrence of parallel independent discoveries and inventions as "proof" of the social determination of knowledge was a repeated theme throughout the nineteenth century. As early as 1828,
Macaulay in his essay on Dryden had noted concerning Newton's and Leibniz's invention of the calculus: "Mathematical science, indeed, had reached such a point, that
if neither of them had existed, the principle must inevitably have occurred to some
person within a few years." He cites other cases in point. Victorian manufacturers
shared the same view with Marx and Engels. In our own day, this thesis, based on
independent duplicate inventions, has been especially emphasized by Dorothy
Thomas, Ogburn, and Vierkandt.
29. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, p. 97.
30. V. I. Lenin, "The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism," in
Marx, Selected Works, 1: 54.
31. Nikolai Bukharin, Historical Materialism (New York: International Publishers, 1925), pp. xi-xii; B. Hessen in Science at the Cross-Roads (London: Kniga,
1932), p. 154; A. I. Timeniev in Marxism and Modern Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), p. 310; "Only Marxism, only the ideology of the advanced
revolutionary class is scientific."

22

The Sociology of Knowledge

tion but not "historical, political and social science thinking as well as the
thought of everyday life." 32 Social position determines the "perspective,"
that is, "the manner in which one views an object, what one perceives in
it, and how one construes it in his thinking." The situational determination
of thought does not render it invalid; it does, however, particularize the
scope of the inquiry and the limits of its validity. 33
If Marx did not sharply differentiate the superstructure, Scheler goes to
the other extreme. He distinguishes a variety of forms of knowledge. To
begin with, there are the "relatively natural Weltanschauungen": that which
is accepted as given, as neither requiring nor being capable of justification.
These are, so to speak, the cultural axioms of groups; what Joseph Glanvill, some three hundred years ago, called a "climate of opinion." A
primary task of the sociology of knowledge is to discover the laws of
transformation of these Weltanschauungen. And since these outlooks are
by no means necessarily valid, it follows that the sociology of knowledge
is not concerned merely with tracing the existential bases of truth buf also
of "social illusion, superstition and socially conditioned errors and forms
of deception." 34
The Weltanschauungen constitute organic growths and develop only in
long time-spans. They are scarcely affected by theories. Without adequate
evidence, Scheler claims that they can be changed in any fundamental
sense only through race-mixture or conceivably through the "mixture" of
language and culture. Building upon these very slowly changing Weltanschauungen are the more "artificial" forms of knowledge which may be
ordered in seven classes, according to degree of artificiality: ( 1 ) myth
and legend; (2) knowledge implicit in the natural folk-language; (3) religious knowledge (ranging from the vague emotional intuition to the fixed
dogma of a church); ( 4) the basic types of mystical knowledge; (5) philosophical-metaphysical knowledge; ( 6) positive knowledge of mathematics,
the natural and cultural sciences; (7) technological knowledge. 35 The more
artificial these types of knowledge, the more rapidly they change. It is
evident, says Scheler, that religions change far more slowly than the various
metaphysics, and the latter persist for much longer periods than the results
of positive science, which change from hour to hour.
This hypothesis of rates of change bears some points of similarity to
Alfred Weber's thesis that civilizational change outruns cultural change
and to the Ogburn hypothesis that "material" factors change more rapidly
32. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, pp. 150, 243; Mannheim, "Die Bedeutung
der Konkurrenz im Gebiete des Geistigen," in Verhandlungen des 6. deutschen Soziologentages (Tuebingen: 1929), p. 41.
33. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, pp. 256, 264.
34. Scheler, Die Wissensformen, pp. 59-61.
35. Ibid., p. 62.

Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

23

than the "nonmaterial." Scheler's hypothesis shares the limitations of these

others as well as several additional shortcomings. He nowhere indicates
with any clarity what his principle of classification of types of knowledge
-so-called artificiality-actually denotes. Why, for example, is "mystical
knowledge" conceived as more "artificial" than religious dogmas? He does
not at all consider what is entailed by saying that one type of knowledge
changes more rapidly than another. Consider his curious equating of new
scientific "results" with metaphysical systems; how does one compare the
degree of change implied in neo-Kantian philosophy with, say, change in
biological theory during the corresponding period? Scheler boldly asserts
a sevenfold variation in rates of change and, of course, does not empirically confirm this elaborate claim. In view of the difficulties encountered
in testing much simpler hypotheses, it is not at all clear what is gained by
setting forth an elaborate hypothesis of this type.
Yet only certain aspects of this knowledge are held to be sociologically
determined. On the basis of certain postulates, which need not be considered here, Scheler goes on to assert:
The sociological character of all knowledge, of all forms of thought, intuition
and cognition is unquestionable. Although the content and even less the objective validity of all knowledge is not determined by the controlling perspectives
of social interests, nevertheless this is the case with the selection of the objects
of knowledge. Moreover, the "forms" of the mental processes by means of
which knowledge is acquired are always and necessarily codetermined sociologically, i.e. by the social structure. as
Since explanation consists in tracing the relatively new to the familiar and
known and since society is "better known" than anything else, 37 it is to be
expected that the modes of thought and intuition and the classification
of knowable things generally are codetermined (mitbedingt) by the division and classification of groups which comprise the society.
Scheler flatly repudiates all forms of sociologism. He seeks to escape a
radical relativism by resorting to a metaphysical dualism. He posits a realm
of "timeless essences" which in varying degrees enter into the content of
judgments; a realm utterly distinct from that of historical and social reality
which determines the act of judgments. As Mandelbaum has aptly summarized this view:
The realm of essences is to Scheler a realm of possibilities out of which we,
bound to time and our interest, first select one set and then another for consideration. Where we as historians turn the spotlight of our attention depends
upon our own sociologically determined valuations; what we see there is deter36. Ibid., p. 55 (italics added).
37. See the same assumption of Durkheim, cited in fn. 14 of this essay.

24

The Sociology of Knowledge

mined by the set of absolute and timeless values which are implicit in the past
with which we are dealing. as
This is indeed counterrelativism by fiat. Merely asserting the distinction
between essence and existences avoids the incubus of relativism by exorcising it. The concept of eternal essences may be congenial to the metaphysician; it is wholly foreign to empirical inquiry. It is noteworthy that
these conceptions play no significant part in Scheler's empirical efforts to
establish relations between knowledge and society.
Scheler indicates that different types of knowledge are bound up with
particular forms of groups. The content of Plato's theory of ideas required
the form and organization of the platonic academy; so, too, the organization of Protestant churches and sects was determined by the content of
their beliefs which could exist only in this and in no other type of social
organization, as Troeltsch has shown. And, similarly, Gemeinschaft types
of society have a traditionally defined fund of knowledge which is handed
down as conclusive; they are not concerned with discovering or extending
knowledge. The very effort to test the traditional knowledge, in so far as
it implies doubt, is ruled out as virtually blasphemous. In such a group,
the prevailing logic and mode of thought is that of an "ars demonstrandi"
not of an "ars inveniendi." Its methods are prevailingly ontological and
dogmatic, not epistemologic and critical; its mode of thought is that of
conceptual realism, not nominalistic as in the Gesellschaft type of organization; its system of categories, organismic and not mechanistic. 39
Durkheim extends sociological inquiry into the social genesis of the
categories of thought, basing his hypothesis on three types of presumptive
evidence. ( 1) The fact of cultural variation in the categories and the rules
of logic "prove that they depend upon factors that are historical and consequently social."40 (2) Since concepts are imbedded in the very language
the individual acquires (and this holds as well for the special terminology
of the scientist) and since some of these conceptual terms refer to things
which we, as individuals, have never experienced, it is clear that they are
a product of the society. 41 And ( 3), the acceptance or rejection of concepts is not determined merely by their objective validity but also by their
consistency with other prevailing beliefs.42
38. Maurice Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge (New York:
Liveright, 1938), p. 150; Sorokin posits a similar sphere of "timeless ideas," e.g., in
his Sociocultural Causality, Space, Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 1943),
pp. 215, passim.
39. Scheler, Die Wissensformen, pp. 22-23; compare a similar characterization of
"sacred schools" of thought by Florian Znaniecki, The Social Role of the Man of
Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), chap. 3.
40. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, pp. 12, 18, 439.
41. Ibid., pp. 433-35.
42. Ibid., p. 438.

Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

25

Yet Durkheim does not subscribe to a type of relativism in which there

are merely competing criteria of validity. The social origin of the categories does not render them wholly arbitrary so far as their applicability
to nature is concerned. They are, in varying degrees, adequate to their
object. But since social structures vary (and with them, the categorical
apparatus) there are inescapable "subjective" elements in the particular
logical constructions current in a society. These subjective elements "must
be progressively rooted out, if we are to approach reality more closely."
And this occurs under determinate social conditions. With the extension
of intercultural contacts, with the spread of intercommunication between
persons drawn from different societies, with the enlargement of the society,
the local frame of reference becomes disrupted. "Things can no longer be
contained in the social moulds according to which they were primitively
classified; they must be organized according to principles which are their
own. So logical organization differentiates itself from the social organization and becomes autonomous. Genuinely human thought is not a primitive
fact; it is the product of history." 43 Particularly those conceptions which
are subjected to scientifically methodical criticism come to have a greater
objective adequacy. Objectivity is itself viewed as a social emergent.
Throughout, Durkheim's dubious epistemology is intertwined with his
substantive account of the social roots of concrete designations of temporal, spatial, and other units. We need not indulge in the traditional exaltation of the categories as a thing set apart and foreknown to note that
Durkheim was dealing not with them but with conventional divisions of
time and space. He observed, in passing, that differences in these respects
should not lead us to "neglect the similarities, which are no less essential."
If he pioneered in relating variations in systems of concepts to variations
in social organization, he did not succeed in establishing the social origin
of the categories.
Like Durkheim, Granet attaches great significance to language as constraining and fixing prevalent concepts and modes of thought. He has
shown how the Chinese language is not equipped to note concepts, analyze
ideas, or to present doctrines discursively. It has remained intractable to
formal precision. The Chinese word does not fix a notion with a definite
degree of abstraction and generality, but evokes an indefinite complex of
particular images. Thus, there is no word which simply signifies "old
man." Rather, a considerable number of words "paint different aspects
of old age": k'i, those who need a richer diet; k'ao, those who have difficulty in breathing, and so on. These concrete evocations entail a multitude
of other similarly concrete images of every detail of the mode of life of
the aged: those who should be exempt from military service; those for
43. Ibid., pp. 444-45, 437.

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The Sociology of Knowledge

whom funerary material should be held in readiness; those who have a

right to carry a staff through the town, and so on. These are but a few
of the images evoked by k'i which, in general, corresponds to the quasisingular notion of old persons, some sixty to seventy years of age. Words
and sentences thus have an entirely concrete, emblematic character. 44
Just as the language is concrete and evocative, so the most general ideas
of ancient Chinese thought were unalterably concrete, none of them comparable to our abstract ideas. Neither time nor space was abstractly
conceived. Time proceeds by cycles and is round; space is square. The
earth which is square is divided into squares; the walls of towns, fields,
and camps should form a square. Camps, buildings, and towns must be
oriented and the selection of the proper orientation is in the hands of a
ritual leader. Techniques of the division and management of space-surveying, town development, architecture, political geography-and the geometrical speculations which they presuppose are all linked with a set of
social regulations. Particularly as these pertain to periodic assemblies,
they reaffirm and reinforce in every detail the symbols which represent
space. They account for its square form, its heterogeneous and hierarchic
character, a conception of space which could only have arisen in a feudal
society. 45
Though Granet may have established the social grounds of concrete
designations of time and space, it is not at all clear that he deals with data
comparable to Western conceptions. He considers traditionalized or ritualized or magical conceptions and implicitly compares these with our matterof-fact, technical, or scientific notions. But in a wide range of actual
practices, the Chinese did not act on the assumption that "time is round"
and "space, square." When comparable spheres of activity and thought
are considered it is questionable that this radical cleavage of "categorical
systems" occurs, in the sense that there are no common denominators of
thought and conception. Granet has demonstrated qualitative differences
of concepts in certain contexts, but not within such comparable contexts
as, say, that of technical practice. His work testifies to different foci of
intellectual interests in the two spheres and within the ritualistic sphere,
basic differences of outlook, but not unbridgeable gaps in other spheres.
The fallacy which is most prominent in Levy-Bruhl's concept of the "prelogicality" of the primitive mind thus appears in the work of Granet as
well. As Malinowski and Rivers have shown, when comparable spheres
of thought and activity are considered, no such irreconcilable differences
are found. 46
44. Granet, La pensee chinoise, pp. 37-38, 82, and the whole of chap. 1.
45. Ibid., pp. 87-95.
46. Cf. B. Malinowski in Magic, Science & Religion (Glencoe: The Free Press,
1948), p. 9: "Every primitive community is in possession of a considerable store of

Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

27

Sorokin shares in this same tendency to ascribe entirely disparate criteria

of truth to his different culture types. He has cast into a distinctive idiom
the fact of shifts of attention on the part of intellectual elites in different
historical societies. In certain societies, religious conceptions and particular
types of metaphysics are at the focus of attention, whereas in other societies, empirical science becomes the center of interest. But the several
"systems of truth" coexist in each of these societies within certain spheres;
the Catholic church has not abandoned its "ideational" criteria even in
this sensate age.
Insofar as Sorokin adopts the position of radically different and disparate criteria of truth, he must locate his own work within this context.
It may be said, though an extensive discussion would be needed to document it, that he never resolves this problem. His various efforts to cope
with a radically relativistic impasse differ considerably. Thus, at the very
outset, he states that his constructions must be tested in the same way "as
any scientific law. First of all the principle must by nature be logical;
second, it must successfully meet the test of the 'relevant facts,' that is, it
must fit and represent the facts." 47 In Sorokin's own terminology, he has
thereby adopted a scientific position characteristic of a "sensate system
of truth." When he confronts his own epistemologic position directly,
however, he adopts an "integralist" conception of truth which seeks to
assimilate empirical and logical criteria as well as a "supersensory, superrational, metalogical act of 'intuition' or 'mystical experience.' " 48 He thus
posits an integration of these diverse systems. In order to justify the "truth
of faith"-the only item which would remove him from the ordinary criteria used in current scientific work-he indicates that "intuition" plays
an important role as a source of scientific discovery. But does this meet
the issue? The question is not one of the psychological sources of valid
conclusions, but of the criteria and methods of validation. Which criteria
would Sorokin adopt when "supersensory" intuitions are not consistent
with empirical observation? In such cases, presumably, so far as we can
judge from his work rather than from his comments about his work, he
accepts the facts and rejects the intuition. All this suggests that Sorokin
is discussing under the generic label of "truth" quite distinct and not comparable types of judgments: just as the chemist's analysis of an oil painting
is neither consistent nor inconsistent with its aesthetic evaluation, so Sorokin's systems of truth refer to quite different kinds of judgments. And,
indeed, he is finally led to say as much, when he remarks that "each of
knowledge, based on experience and fashioned by reason." See also Emile BenoitSmullyan, "Granet's La pensee chinoise," American Sociological Review 1 (1936):
487-92.
47. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, 1: 36; cf. 2: ll-12n.
48. Ibid., vol. 4, chap. 16; idem, Sociocultural Causality, chap. 5.

28

The Sociology of Knowledge

the systems of truth, within its legitimate field of competency, gives us

genuine cognition of the respective aspects of reality." 49 But whatever his
private opinion of intuition he cannot draw it into his sociology as a
criterion (rather than a source) of valid conclusions.
Relations of Knowledge to the Existential Basis
Though this problem is obviously the nucleus of every theory in the sociology of knowledge, it has often been treated by implication rather than
directly. Yet each type of imputed relation between knowledge and society
presupposes an entire theory of sociological method and social causation.
The prevailing theories in this field have dealt with one or both of two
major types of relation: causal or functional, and the symbolic or organismic or meaningfui.5
Marx and Engels, of course, dealt solely with some kind of causal relation between the economic basis and ideas, variously terming this relation
as "determination, correspondence, reflection, outgrowth, dependence,"
and so on. In addition, there is an "interest" or "need" relation; when
strata have (imputed) needs at a particular stage of historical development,
there is held to be a definite pressure for appropriate ideas and knowledge
to develop. The inadequacies of these divers formulations have risen up to
plague those who derive from the Marxist tradition in the present day. 51
Since Marx held that thought is not a mere "reflection" of objective class
position, as we have seen, this raises anew the problem of its imputation
to a determinate basis. The prevailing Marxist hypotheses for coping with
this problem involve a theory of history which is the ground for determining whether the ideology is "situationally adequate" for a given stratum
in the society: this requires a hypothetical construction of what men would
think and perceive if they were able to comprehend the historical situation
adequately. 52 But such insight into the situation need not actually be widely
current within particular social strata. This, then, leads to the further
problem of "false consciousness," of how ideologies which are neither in
conformity with the interests of a class nor situationally adequate come
to prevail.
49. Sociocultural Causality, 230-31n.
50. The distinctions between these have long been considered in European sociological thought. The most elaborate discussion in this country is that by Sorokin in
Social and Cultural Dynamics; see, for example, vol. 1, chaps. 1-2.
51. Cf. the comments of Hans Speier, "The Social Determination of Ideas," Social
Research 5 (1938): 182-205; C. Wright Mills, "Language, Logic and Culture,"
American Sociological Review 4 (1939): 670-80.
52. Cf. the formulation by Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, pp. 175 ff.; Georg
Lukacs, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (Berlin, 1923 ), pp. 61 ff.; Arthur Child,
"The Problem of Imputation in the Sociology of Knowledge," Ethics 51 (1941):
200-214.

Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

29

A partial empirical account of false consciousness, implied in the Manifesto, rests on the view that the bourgeoisie control the content of culture
and thus diffuse doctrines and standards alien to the interests of the proletariat. 53 Or, in more general terms, "the ruling ideas of each age have ever
been the ideas of its ruling class." But this is only a partial account; at
most it deals with the false consciousness of the subordinated class. It
might, for example, partly explain the fact noted by Marx that even where
the peasant proprietor "does belong to the proletariat by his position he
does not believe that he does." It would not, however, be pertinent in
seeking to account for the false consciousness of the ruling class itself.
Another, though not clearly formulated, theme which bears upon the
problem of false consciousness runs throughout Marxist theory. This is
the conception of ideology as being an unwitting, unconscious expression
of "real motives," these being in turn construed in terms of the objective
interests of social classes. Thus, there is repeated stress on the unwitting
nature of ideologies: "Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called
thinker consciously indeed but with a false consciousness. The real motives
impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives." 54
The ambiguity of the term "correspondence" to refer to the connection
between the material basis and the idea can only be overlooked by the
polemical enthusiast. Ideologies are construed as "distortions of the social
situation";55 as merely "expressive" of the material conditions;56 and,
whether "distorted" or not, as motivational support for carrying through
real changes in the society. 57 It is at this last point, when "illusory" beliefs
are conceded to provide motivation for action, that Marxism ascribes a
measure of independence to ideologies in the historical process. They are
no longer merely epiphenomenal. They enjoy a measure of autonomy.
From this develops the notion of interacting factors in which the superstructure, though interdependent with the material basis, is also assumed
53. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 39: "In so far as they rule as a
class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they
do this in their whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their
age."
54. Engels' letter to Mehring, 14 July 1893, in Marx, Selected Works, 1: 388-89;
cf. Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire, p. 33; idem, Critique of Political Economy, p.
12.
55. Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire, p. 39, where the democratic Montagnards
indulge in self-deception.
56. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, pp. 26-27. Cf. Engels, Feuerbach,
pp. 122-23: "The failure to exterminate the Protestant heresy corresponded to the
invincibility of the rising bourgeoisie .... Here Calvinism proved itself to be the true
religious disguise of the interests of the bourgeoisie of that time" (italics added).
57. Marx grants motivational significance to the "illusions" of the burgeoning
bourgeoisie, in Der achtzehnte Brumaire, p. 8.

30

The Sociology of Knowledge

to have some degree of independence. Engels explicitly recognized that

earlier formulations were inadequate in at least two respects: first, that
both he and Marx had previously overemphasized the economic factor
and understated the role of interaction;58 the second, that they had
"neglected" the formal side-the way in which these ideas develop. 59
The Marx-Engels views on the connectives of ideas and economic substructure hold, then, that the economic structure constitutes the framework
which limits the range of ideas that will prove socially effective; ideas
which do not have pertinence for one or another of the conflicting classes
may arise, but will be of little consequence. Economic conditions are
necessary, but not sufficient, for the emergence and spread of ideas which
express either the interests or outlook, or both, of distinct social strata.
There is no strict determination of ideas by economic conditions, but a
definite predisposition. Knowing the economic conditions, we can predict
the kinds of ideas which can exercise a controlling influence in a direction
that can be effective. "Men make their own history, but they do not
make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen
by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past." And in the making of history, ideas and ideologies
play a definite role: consider only the view of religion as "the opiate of
the masses"; consider further the importance attached by Marx and Engels
to making those in the proletariat "aware" of their "own interests." Since
there is no fatality in the development of the total social structure, but only
a development of economic conditions which make certain lines of change
possible and probable, idea-systems may play a decisive role in the selection of one alternative which "corresponds" to the real balance of power
rather than another alternative which runs counter to the existing power
situation and is therefore destined to be unstable, precarious, and temporary. There is an ultimate compulsive which derives from economic development, but this compulsive does not operate with such detailed finality
that no variation of ideas can occur at all.
The Marxist theory of history assumes that, sooner or later, idea-systems
which are inconsistent with the actually prevailing and incipient power
structure will be rejected in favor of those which more nearly express the
actual alignment of power. It is this view that Engels expresses in his
metaphor of the "zig-zag course" of abstract ideology: ideologies may
temporarily deviate from what is compatible with the current social relations of production, but they are ultimately brought back in line. For this
reason, the Marxist analysis of ideology is always bound to be concerned
with the "total" historical situation, in order to account both for the tern58. Engels, letter to Joseph Bloch, 21 September 1890, in Marx, Selected Works,
1: 383.
59. Engels, letter to Mehring, 14 July 1893, ibid., 1: 390.

Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

31

porary deviations and the later accommodation of ideas to the economic

compulsives. But for this same reason, Marxist analyses are apt to have
an excessive degree of "flexibility," almost to the point where any development can be explained away as a temporary aberration or deviation; where
"anachronisms" and "lags" become labels for the explaining away of existing beliefs which do not correspond to theoretical expectations; where the
concept of "accident" provides a ready means of saving the theory from
facts which seem to challenge its validity. 60 Once a theory includes concepts such as "lags," "thrusts," "anachronisms," "accidents," "partial independence," and "ultimate dependence," it becomes so labile and so
indistinct that it can be reconciled with virtually any configuration of data.
Here, as in several other theories in the sociology of knowledge, a decisive
question must be raised in order to determine whether we have a genuine
theory: how can the theory be invalidated? In any given historical situation, which data will contradict and invalidate the theory? Unless this can
be answered directly, unless the theory involves statements which can be
controverted by definite types of evidence, it remains merely a pseudotheory which will be compatible with any array of data.
Though Mannheim has gone far toward developing actual research
procedures in the substantive sociology of knowledge, he has not appreciably clarified the connectives of thought and society. As he indicates,
once a thought structure has been analyzed, there arises the problem of
imputing it to definite groups. This requires not only an empirical investigation of the groups or strata which prevalently think in these terms but
also an interpretation of why these groups, and not others, manifest this
type of thought. This latter question implies a social psychology which
Mannheim has not systematically developed.
The most serious shortcoming of Durkheim's analysis lies precisely in
his uncritical acceptance of a naive theory of correspondence in which the
categories of thought are held to "reflect" certain features of the group
organization. Thus "there are societies in Australia and North America
where space is conceived in the form of an immense circle, because the
camp has a circular form ... the social organization has been the model
for the spatial organization and a reproduction of it." 81 In similar fashion,
the general notion of time is derived from the specific units of time differentiated in social activities (ceremonies, feasts, rites). 62 The category of
class and the modes of classification, which involve the notion of a hierarchy, are derived from social grouping and stratification. Those social
categories are then "projected into our conception of the new world." 63 In
60.
61.
62.
63.

Cf. Weber, Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 166-70.

Durkheim, Elementary Forms, pp. 11-12.
Ibid., pp. 10-11.
Ibid., p. 148.

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The Sociology of Knowledge

summary, then, categories "express" the different aspects of the social

order. 64 Durkheim's sociology of knowledge suffers from his avoidance of
a social psychology.
The central relation between ideas and existential factors for Scheler is
interaction. Ideas interact with existential factors which serve as selective
agencies, releasing or checking the extent to which potential ideas find
actual expression. Existential factors do not "create" or "determine" the
content of ideas; they merely account for the difference between potentiality and actuality; they hinder, retard, or quicken the actualization of
potential ideas. In a figure reminiscent of Clerk Maxwell's hypothetical
daemon, Scheler states: "in a definite fashion and order, existential factors
open and close the sluice-gates to the flood of ideas." This formulation,
which ascribes to existential factors the function of selection from a selfcontained realm of ideas is, according to Scheler, a basic point of agreement between such otherwise divergent theorists as Dilthey, Troeltsch,
Max Weber, and himself. 65
Scheler operates as well with the concept of "structural identities" which
refers to common presuppositions of knowledge or belief on the one hand,
and of social, economic, or political structure on the other. 66 Thus, the rise
of mechanistic thought in the sixteenth century, which came to dominate
prior organismic thought is inseparable from the new individualism, the
incipient dominance of the power-driven machine over the hand-tool, the
incipient dissolution of Gemeinschaft into Gesellschaft, production for a
commodity market, rise of the principle of competition in the ethos of
western society, and so on. The notion of scientific research as an endless
process through which a store of knowledge can be accumulated for practical application as the occasion demands and the total divorce of this
science from theology and philosophy was not possible without the rise of
a new principle of infinite acquisition characteristic of modern capitalism. 67
In discussing such structural identities, Scheler does not ascribe primacy
either to the socioeconomic sphere or to the sphere of knowledge. Rather,
and this Scheler regards as one of the most significant propositions in the
field, both are determined by the impulse structure of the elite which is
closely bound up with the prevailing ethos. Thus, modern technology is
not merely the application of a pure science based on observation, logic,
and mathematics. It is far more the product of an orientation toward the
control of nature which defined the purposes as well as the conceptual
structure of scientific thought. This orientation is largely implicit and is
not to be confused with the personal motives of scientists.
64.
65.
66.
67.

Ibid., p. 440.
Scheler, Die Wissensformen, p. 32.
Ibid, p. 56.
Ibid., p. 25; cf. pp. 482-84.

Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

33

With the concept of structural identity, Scheler verges on the concept

of cultural integration or Sinnzusammenhang. It corresponds to Sorokin's
conception of a "meaningful cultural system" involving "the identity of
the fundamental principles and values that permeate all its parts," which
is distinguished from a "causal system" involving interdependence of
parts. 68 Having constructed his types of culture, Sorokin's survey of criteria of truth, ontology, metaphysics, scientific and technologic output,
and so on, finds a marked tendency toward the meaningful integration of
these with the prevailing culture.
Sorokin has boldly confronted the problem of how to determine the
extent to which such integration occurs, recognizing, despite his vitriolic
comments on the statisticians of our sensate age, that to deal with the
extent or degree of integration necessarily implies some statistical measure.
Accordingly, he developed numerical indexes of the various writings and
authors in each period, classified these in their appropriate category, and
thus assessed the comparative frequency (and influence) of the various
systems of thought. Whatever the technical evaluation of the validity and
reliability of these cultural statistics, he has directly acknowledged the
problem overlooked by many investigators of integrated culture or Sinnzusammenhaengen, namely, the approximate degree or extent of such integration. Moreover, he plainly bases his empirical conclusions very largely
upon these statistics. 69 And these conclusions again testify that his approach
leads to a statement of the problem of connections between existential
bases and knowledge, rather than to its solution. Thus, to take a case in
point, "empiricism" is defined as the typical sensate system of truth. The
last five centuries, and more particularly the last century represent "sensate
culture par excellence!" 70 Yet, even in this flood-tide of sensate culture,
Sorokin's statistical indices show only some 53 percent of influential
writings in the field of "empiricism." And in the earlier centuries of this
sensate culture-from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth-the indices
of empiricism are consistently lower than those for rationalism (which is
associated, presumably, with an idealistic rather than a sensate culture). 71
The object of these observations is not to raise the question whether
68. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, vol. 4, chap. 1; vol. 1, chap. 1.
69. Despite the basic place of these statistics in his empirical findings, Sorokin
adopts a curiously ambivalent attitude toward them, an attitude similar to the attitude toward experiment imputed to Newton: a device to make his prior conclusions
"intelligible and to convince the vulgar." Note Sorokin's approval of Park's remark
that his statistics are merely a concession to the prevailing sensate mentality and that
"if they want 'em, let 'em have 'em." See Sorokin, Sociocultural Causality, p. 95n.
Sorokin's ambivalence arises from his effort to integrate quite disparate "systems
of truth."
70. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, 2: 51.
71. Ibid., 2: 30.

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The Sociology of Knowledge

Sorokin's conclusions coincide with his statistical data: it is not to ask

why the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are said to have a dominant
"sensate system of truth" in view of these data. Rather, it is to indicate
that even on Sorokin's own premises, overall characterizations of historical
cultures constitute merely a first step, which must be followed by analyses
of deviations from the central tendencies of the culture. Once the notion
of extent of integration is introduced, the existence of types of knowledge
which are not integrated with the dominant tendencies cannot be viewed
merely as "congeries" or as "contingent." Their social bases must be
ascertained in a fashion for which an emanationist theory does not provide.
A basic concept which serves to differentiate generalizations about the
thought and knowledge of an entire society or culture is that of the
"audience" or "public" or what Znaniecki calls "the social circle." Men of
knowledge do not orient themselves exclusively toward their data nor
toward the total society, but to special segments of that society with their
special demands, criteria of validity, of significant knowledge, of pertinent
problems, and so on. It is through anticipation of these demands and
expectations of particular audiences, which can be effectively located in
the social structure, that men of knowledge organize their own work, define
their data, seize upon problems. Hence, the more differentiated the society,
the greater the range of such effective audiences, the greater the variation
in the foci of scientific attention, of conceptual formulations, and of
procedures for certifying claims to knowledge. By linking each of these
typologically defined audiences to their distinctive social position, it becomes possible to provide a wissenssoziologische account of variations and
conflicts of thought within the society, a problem that is necessarily
bypassed in an emanationist theory. Thus, the scientists in seventeenthcentury England and France who were organized in newly established
scientific societies addressed themselves to audiences very different from
those of the savants who remained exclusively in the traditional universities.
The direction of their efforts, toward a "plain, sober, empirical" exploration of specific technical and scientific problems differed considerably
from the speculative, unexperimental work of those in the universities.
Searching out such variations in effective audiences, exploring their
distinctive criteria of significant and valid knowledge, 72 relating these to
their position within the society, and examining the sociopsychological
processes through which these operate to constrain certain modes of
thought constitutes a procedure which promises to take research in the
72. The Rickert-Weber concept of "Wertbeziehung" (relevance to value) is but
a first step in this direction; there remains the further task of differentiating the
various sets of values and relating these to distinctive groups or strata within the
society.

Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

35

sociology of knowledge from the plane of general imputation to that of

testable empirical inquiry. 73
The foregoing account deals with the main substance of prevailing
theories in this field. Limitations of space permit only the briefest consideration of one other aspect of these theories singled out in our paradigm:
functions imputed to various types of mental productions. 74

Functions of Existentially Conditioned Knowledge

In addition to providing causal explanations of knowledge, theories ascribe
social functions to knowledge, functions which presumably serve to account for its persistence or change. These functional analyses cannot
be examined in any detail here, though a detailed study of them would
undoubtedly prove rewarding.
The most distinctive feature of the Marxist imputation of function is
its ascription, not to the society as a whole, but to distinct strata within
the society. This holds not only for ideological thinking but also for natural
science. In capitalist society, science and derivative technology are held
to become a further instrument of control by the dominant class. 75 Along
these same lines, in ferreting out the economic determinants of scientific
development, Marxists have often thought it sufficient to show that the
scientific results enabled the solution of some economic or technological
need. But the application of science to a need does not necessarily testify
that the need has been significantly involved in leading to the result.
Hyperbolic functions were discovered two centuries before they had any
practical significance and the study of conic sections had a broken history
of two millennia before being applied in science and technology. Can
we infer, then, that the "needs" which were ultimately satisfied through
such applications served to direct the attention of mathematicians to these
73. This is perhaps the most distinctive variation in the sociology of knowledge
now developing in American sociological circles, and may almost be viewed as an
American acculturation of European approaches. This development characteristically
derives from the social psychology of G. H. Mead. Its pertinence in this connection
is being indicated by C. Wright Mills, Gerard de Gre, and others. See Znaniecki's
conception of the "social circle," in Social Role. See also the beginnings of empirical
findings along these lines in the more general field of public communications: Paul
F. Lazarsfeld and R. K. Merton, "Studies in Radio and Film Propaganda," Transactions, New York Academy of Sciences, 2d ser., 6 (1943): 58-79.
74. An appraisal of historicist and ahistorical approaches is necessarily omitted. It
may be remarked that this controversy definitely admits of a middle ground.
75. For example, Marx quotes from the nineteenth century apologist of capitalism,
Ure, who, speaking of the invention of the self-acting mule, says: "A creation destined to restore order among the industrious classes.... This invention confirms the
great doctrine already propounded, that when capital enlists science into her service,
the refractory hand of labor will always be taught docility" (Capital, 1: 477).

36

The Sociology of Knowledge

fields, that there was, so to speak, a retroactive influence of some two to

twenty centuries? Detailed inquiry into the relations between the emergence of needs, recognition of these needs by scientists or by those who
direct their selection of problems, and the consequences of such recognition
are required before the role of needs in determining the thematics of
scientific research can be established. 76
In addition to his claim that the categories are social emergents, Durkheim also indicates their social functions. The functional analysis, however,
is intended to account not for the particular categorical system in a
society but for the existence of a system common to the society. For
purposes of intercommunication and for coordinating men's activities, a
common set of categories is indispensable. What the apriorist mistakes
for the constraint of an inevitable, native form of understanding is actually
"the very authority of society, transferring itself to a certain manner of
thought which is the indispensable condition of all common action. " 77
There must be a certain minimum of "logical conformity" if joint social
activities are to be maintained at all; a common set of categories is a
functional necessity. This view is further developed by Sorokin who indicates the several functions served by different systems of social space
and time. 78
Further Problems and Recent Studies
From the foregoing discussion, it becomes evident that a wide diversity
of problems in this field require further investigation. 79
Scheler had indicated that the social organization of intellectual
activity is significantly related to the character of the knowledge which
develops under its auspices. One of the earliest studies of the problem in
this country was Veblen's caustic, impressionistic, and often perceptive
account of the pressures shaping American university Iife. 80 In more
systematic fashion, Wilson has dealt with the methods and criteria of
recruitment, the assignment of status, and the mechanisms of control of the
76. Compare B. Hessen, Science at the Cross-Roads; R. K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (Bruges: Osiris History of Science
Monographs, 1938), chaps. 7-10; J. D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science (New
York: The Macmillan Co., 1939); J. G. Crowther, The Social Relations of Science
(New York: The Macmillan Co., 1941); Bernard Barber, Science and the Social
Order (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1952); Gerard De Gre, Science as a Social
Institution (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1955).
77. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, pp. 17, 10-ll, 443.
78. Sorokin, Sociocultural Causality, passim.
79. For further summaries, see Louis Wirth's preface to Mannheim, Ideology and
Utopia, xxviii-xxxi; J. B. Gittler, "Possibilities of a Sociology of Science," Social
Forces 18 (1940): 350-59.
80. Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (New York: Huebsch,
1918).

Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

37

academic man, thus providing a substantial basis for comparative studies. 81

Setting forth a typology of the roles of men of knowledge, Znaniecki
developed a series of hypotheses concerning the relations between these
roles and the types of knowledge cultivated; between types of knowledge
and the bases of appraisal of the scientist by members of the society;
between role-definitions and attitudes toward practical and theoretical
knowledge; and so on. 82 Much remains to be investigated concerning the
bases of class identifications by intellectuals, their alienation from dominant
or subordinate strata in the population, their avoidance of or indulgence in
researches which have immediate value-implications challenging current
institutional arrangements inimical to the attainment of culturally approved
goals, 83 the pressures toward technicism and away from dangerous
thoughts, the bureaucratization of intellectuals as a process whereby problems of policy are converted into problems of administration, the areas of
social life in which expert and positive knowledge are deemed appropriate
and those in which the wisdom of the plain man is alone considered
necessary-in short, the shifting role of the intellectual and the relation of
these changes to the structure, content, and influence of his work require
growing attention, as changes in the social organization increasingly subject
the intellectual to conflicting demands. 84
Increasingly, it has been assumed that the social structure does not
influence science merely by focusing the attention of scientists upon certain
problems for research. In addition to the studies to which we have already
referred, others have dealt with the ways in which the cultural and social
context enters into the conceptual phrasing of scientific problems. Darwin's
theory of selection was modeled after the prevailing notion of a competitive
economic order, a notion which in turn has been assigned an ideological
function through its assumption of a natural identity of interests. 85 Rus81. Logan Wilson, The Academic Man; cf. E. Y. Hartshorne, The German Universities and National Socialism (Harvard University Press, 1937).
82. Florian Znaniecki, Social Role.
83. Gunnar Myrdal in his treatise, An American Dilemma, repeatedly indicates
the "concealed valuations" of American social scientists studying the American Negro
and the effect of these valuations on the formulation of "scientific problems" in this
area of research; see especially 2: 1027-64.
84. Mannheim refers to an unpublished monograph on the intellectual; general
bibliographies are to be found in his books and in Roberto Michels's article on
"Intellectuals," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Recent papers include C. Wright
Mills, "The Social Role of the Intellectual," Politics, vol. 1 (April 1944); R. K.
Merton, "Role of the Intellectual in Public Policy," presented at the annual meeting
of the American Sociological Society, 4 December 1943; Arthur Koestler, "The
Intelligentsia," Horizon 9 (1944):162-75.
85. Keynes observed that "The Principle of the Survival of the Fittest could be
regarded as one vast generalization of the Ricardian economics" (quoted by Talcott
Parsons in The Structure of Social Action, p. 113); cf. Alexander Sandow, "Social
Factors in the Origin of Darwinism," Quarterly Review of Biology 13 (1938):
316-26.

38

The Sociology of Knowledge

sell's half-serious observation on the national characteristics of research

in animal learning points to a further type of inquiry into the relations
between national culture and conceptual formulations. 86 So, too, Fromm
has attempted to show that Freud's "conscious liberalism" tacitly involved
a rejection of impulses tabooed by bourgeois society and that Freud himself was in his patricentric character, a typical representative of a society
which demands obedience and subjection. 87
In much the same fashion, it has been indicated that the conception of
multiple causation is especially congenial to the academician, who has
relative security, is loyal to the status quo from which he derives dignity
and sustenance, who leans toward conciliation and sees something valuable
in all viewpoints, thus tending toward a taxonomy which enables him to
avoid taking sides by stressing the multiplicity of factors and the complexity of problems. 88 Emphases on nature or nurture as prime determinants
of human nature have been linked with opposing political orientations.
Those who emphasize heredity are political conservatives whereas the
environmentalists are prevalently democrats or radicals seeking social
change. 89 But even environmentalists among contemporary American
writers on social pathology adopt conceptions of "social adjustment" which
implicitly assume the standards of small communities as norms and characteristically fail to assess the possibility of certain groups achieving their
86. Bertrand Russell, Philosophy (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1927),
pp. 29-30. Russell remarks that the animals used in psychological research "have all
displayed the national characteristics of the observer. Animals studied by Americans
rush about frantically, with an incredible display of hustle and pep, and at last
achieve the desired result by chance. Animals observed by Germans sit still and
think, and at last evolve the solution out of their inner consciousness." Witticism
need not be mistaken for irrelevance; the possibility of national differences in the
choice and formulation of scientific problems has been repeatedly noted, though not
studied systematically. Cf. Richard Mueller-Freienfels, Psychologie der Wissenschaft
(Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1936), chap. 8, which deals with national, as well as class,
differences in the choice of problems, "styles of thought," and so on, without fully acquiescing in the echt-deutsch requirements of a Krieck. This type of interpretation,
however, can be carried to a polemical and ungrounded extreme, as in Max Scheler's
debunking 'analysis' of English cant. He concludes that, in science, as in all other
spheres, the English are incorrigible 'cantians.' Hume's conception of the ego, substance, and continuity as biologically useful self-deceptions was merely purposive
cant; so, too, was the characteristic English conception of working hypotheses (Maxwell, Kelvin) as aiding the progress of science but not as truth-a conception which
is nothing but a shrewd maneuver to provide momentary control and ordering of the
data. All pragmatism implies this opportunistic cant, says Scheler in Genius des
Krieges (Leipzig: Verlag der Weissenbuecher, 1915).
87. Erich Fromm, "Die gesellschaftliche Bedingtheit der psychoanalytischen
Therapie," Zeitschrift fuer Sozialforschung 4 (1935) :365-97.
88. Lewis S. Feuer, "The Economic Factor in History," Science and Society
4 (1940):174-75.
89. N. Pastore, "The Nature-Nurture Controversy: A Sociological Approach,"
School and Society 51 (1943) :373-77.

Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

39

objectives under the prevailing institutional conditions. 90 The imputations

of perspectives such as these require more systematic study before they
can be accepted, but they indicate recent tendencies to seek out the
perspectives of scholars and to relate these to the framework of experience
and interests constituted by their respective social positions. The questionable character of imputations which are not based on adequate comparative
material is illustrated by a recent account of the writings of Negro scholars.
The selection of analytical rather than morphological categories, of environmental rather than biological determinants of behavior, of exceptional
rather than typical data is ascribed to the caste-induced resentment of
Negro writers, without any effort being 'made to compare the frequency of
similar tendencies among white writers. 91
Vestiges of any tendency to regard the development of science and
technology as wholly self-contained and advancing irrespective of the social
structure are being dissipated by the actual course of historical events. An
increasingly visible control and, often, restraint of scientific research and
invention has been repeatedly documented, notably in a series of studies
by Stern92 who has also traced the bases of resistance to change in
medicine. 93 The basic change in the social organization of Germany has
provided a virtual experimental test of the close dependence of the direction and extent of scientific work upon the prevailing power structure and
the associated cultural outlook. 94 And the limitations of any unqualified
assumption that science or technology represents the basis to which the
social structure niust adjust become evident in the light of studies showing
how science and technology have been put in the service of social or
economic demands. 95
90. C. Wright Mills, "The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists," American
Journal of Sociology 49 (1943): 165-90.
91. William T. Fontaine, "'Social Determination' in the Writings of Negro
Scholars," American Journal of Sociology 49 (1944) :302-15.
92. Bernard J. Stern, "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations," in National Resources Committee, Technological Trends and National Policy
(Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1937), pp. 39-66; "Restraints
upon the Utilization of Inventions," The Annals 200 (1938): 1-19, and further references therein; Walton Hamilton, Patents and Free Enterprise, TNEC Monograph
no. 31 (1941).
93. Bernhard J. Stern, Social Factors in Medical Progress (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1927); idem, Society and Medical Progress (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1941); cf. Richard H. Shryock, The Development of Modern
Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936); Henry E. Sigerist,
Man and Medicine (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1932).
94. Hartshorne, German Universities and National Socialism.
95. Only most conspicuously in time of war; see Sorokin's observation that centers
of military power tend to be the centers of scientific and technologic development
(Dynamics, vol. 4, pp. 249-51); cf. I. B. Cohen and Bernard Barber, Science and
War (ms.); R. K. Merton, "Science and Military Technique," Scientific Monthly
41(1935):542-45; Bernal, Social Function of Science; Julian Huxley, Science and
Social Needs (New York: Harper and Bros., 1935).

40

The Sociology of Knowledge

To develop any further the formidable list of problems which require

and are receiving empirical investigation would outrun the limits of this
chapter. There is only this to be said: the sociology of knowledge is fast
outgrowing a prior tendency to confuse provisional hypothesis with unimpeachable dogma; the plenitude of speculative insights which marked
its early stages are now being subjected to increasingly rigorous test.
Though Toynbee and Sorokin may be correct in speaking of an alternation
of periods of fact-finding and generalization in the history of science, it
seems that the sociology of knowledge has wedded these two tendencies in
what promises to be a fruitful union. Above all, it focuses on problems
which are at the very center of contemporary intellectual interest. 96
96. For extensive bibliographies, see Bernard Barber, Science and the Social Order;
Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia; Barnes, Becker, and Becker, eds., Contemporary
Social Theory.

Znaniecki's
The Social Role
of the Man of
Knowledge
1941

Florian Znaniecki is in many respects the most distinguished exponent of

sociology as a special rather than an encyclopedic social science. In a
remarkable series of books, he has for some twenty years consistently
demonstrated the special contributions of sociology to the analysis of
human interaction and culture. The books evidence a notable theoretical
integration that derives not from dogmatic convictions but from the exploration of new ranges of data guided by a conceptual framework which
has proved conspicuously useful. It is peculiarly fitting that Znaniecki's
latest volume in this series, the Julius Beer Foundation Lectures at Columbia University, should deal with the sociology of the scientist, for until
September 1939 Poland was the home of Nauka Polska and of Organon,
journals devoted exclusively to the "science of science," that is, the
psychology, sociology, history, and philosophy of science.
Znaniecki sets himself two main types of problems in this study of
specialists in knowledge. (Throughout his book, the terms scientist, savant,
and man of knowledge are used synonymously and broadly to designate
such specialists.) The first of these problems is taxonomic: what is the
composition and structure of the various types of scientists' social roles;
what are their interrelations; their lines of development? Secondly, how,
if at all, are the systems of knowledge and methods of savants influenced
by the normative patterns which define their behavior in a social order?
The very formulation of these questions is clear evidence that Znaniecki
has not confused problems in the sociology of knowledge with a sociological
theory of knowledge, that is, with a special epistemology. This is a study
Reprinted with permission from American Sociological Review 6 (February 1941):
111-15.

42

The Sociology of Knowledge

in substantive Wissenssoziologie, not an essay on the foundations of valid

knowledge.
Znaniecki conceives a social role as a dynamic social system involving
four interacting components: ( 1) the social circle: a set of persons who
interact with the actor and estimate his performance (that is, the effective
audience) ; ( 2) the actor's self: the physical and psychological characteristics attributed to him by virtue of his position; ( 3) the actor's social
status: the permissions and immunities assigned to him as inherent in his
position; ( 4) the actor's social functions: his contributions to his social
circle. This paradigm defines the minimal elements which must be examined in the systematic comparison of social roles.
A scant outline of Znaniecki's typology of scientists' roles will not, of
course, set forth the analytical uses to which this typology is put. It will,
however, indicate the classificatory framework within which his analyses
are expressed. Znaniecki's reconstructions of the presumable lines' of
development of one role into another are not included in this outline.
Types of Social Roles of Men of Knowledge
A Technological Advisers
1. Technological expert: the diagnostician who defines the relevant data
in the situation, their essential components and interrelations, and
the theoretic foundations for planned collective tasks; he performs
the "staff" or advisory function.
2. Technological leader: the executive-director who devises the plan and
selects the instrumentalities for its execution on the basis of a
complex of practically oriented, heterogeneous knowledge.
B. Sages 1 provide intellectual justification of collective tendencies of their
party, sect, stratum.

1. Conservative:
2. Novationist:

Apologists for existing

tendencies

Idealists with norms not contained in the existing order

or in the opposition party

(a) "Standpatter"
(a) Oppositionist

(b) Meliorist
(b) Revolutionary

C. Scholars (that is, Schoolmen)

1. Sacred scholar: perpetuates sacred truths through exact and faithful
reproduction of their symbolic expressions; he is charged with the
1. Attention should be called to the instructive comparison between these roles
and Mannheim's concepts of ideologists and utopianists. The fourfold table and
resultant types, supplied by the reviewer, are clearly implicit in Znaniecki's text
(pp. 72-77).

Znaniecki's Social Role of the Man of Knowledge

43

maintenance of a self-contained, stable, unchallengeable, sacred

system of unchanging truths.
2. Secular scholar: with the following subtypes:
a. discoverer of truth: initiates a "school of thought" with a claim to
"absolute truth" validated by the certainty of rational evidence.
b. systematizer: tests and organizes the total existing knowledge in
certain fields into a coherent system by means of deduction from
the self-evident first principles established by the discoverer.
c. contributor: furnishes new findings which are implicitly or explicitly
expected to furnish new proof that experience accords with the
master's system; revises "unsatisfactory" inductive evidence until
it is so integrated or is "justifiably" rejected.
d. fighter for truth: ensures the logical victory of one school over another by convincing scholars in a polemical situation that his
school has a truth-claim validated by rationalistic evidence.
(Differs from tendentious partisan sage by confining polemics to
a closed arena accessible only to those who hold truth as dominant value.)
e. disseminator of knowledge
( 1). popularizer: cultivates amateur interests among adults, thus
aiding popular support of learning, especially in democratized
society.
(2). educating teacher: imparts theoretic knowledge to youth as
part of their non-occupational education.
D. Creators of Knowledge (Explorers)
1. Discoverer of facts (fact-finder): discovers hitherto unknown and unanticipated empirical data, largely as a basis for modifications in
existing systems of knowledge.
2. Discoverer of problems (inductive theorist): discovers new and unforeseen theoretic problems which are to be solved by new theoretical constructions.
It should be noted at once that this is a classification of social roles and
not of persons, and that individual men of knowledge may incorporate
several of these analytically distinguishable roles. A further development of
Znaniecki's analysis would lead to a statement of the circumstances under
which shifts from one role to another occur.
Znaniecki skillfully traces a variety of relations between the components
of these classified roles; relations between role-definitions and types of
knowledge cultivated; types of knowledge and bases of positive estimation
of the scientist by members of the society; normative role-definitions and
attitudes toward practical and theoretical knowledge; and so forth. These
relations are examined genetically and functionally. A brief review cannot

44

The Sociology of Knowledge

even list these relations, but one or two instances will serve to illustrate
the systematic findings.
A convincing demonstration of the value of Znaniecki's approach is
found in his suggestive though brief resume of the various attitudes toward
"new unanticipated facts" of those who perform different intellectual roles.
It should be noted that these divers attitudes can be "understood" (or
"derived") from the particular role-systems in which the men of knowledge
participate; it is, in other words, an analysis of the ways in which various
social structures exert pressures for the adoption of certain attitudes toward new empirical data. The specialized interest in the finding of new
facts is construed as a revolt against established systems of thought which
have persisted largely because they have not been confronted with fresh
stubborn facts. Later, to be sure, even this "rebellious" activity becomes
institutionalized, but it arises initially in opposition to established and
vested intellectual systems. The technological leader regards genuinelynew
facts with suspicion, for they may destroy belief in the rationality of his
established plans, or show the inefficiency of his plans, or disclose undesirable consequences of his program. New facts within the compass of
his activity threaten his status. The technological expert, under the control
of the leader, is circumscribed in new fact-finding lest he discover facts
which are unwelcome to the powers that be. (See, for example, the suppression of new but "unwanted" inventions.) The sage, with his predetermined conclusions, has no use for the impartial observer of new facts
which might embarrass his tendentious views. Scholars have positive or
negative attitudes toward genuinely new facts, depending upon the extent
to which the schools' system is established: in the initial stages new facts
are at least acceptable, but once the system is fully formulated the inte!lectual commitment of the school precludes a favorable attitude toward novel
findings. Thus, "a discoverer of facts, freely roaming in search of the unexpected, has no place in a milieu of scientists with well-regulated tniditional roles." Znaniecki provides a pioneering analysis of the kind of
intellectual neophobia which Pareto largely treated as given rather than
problematical.
In similar fashion, Znaniecki shows how rivalry between schools of
sacred thought leads to secularization. The most general theorem holds that
conflict, as a type of social interaction, leads to the partial secularization of
sacred knowledge in at least three ways. First, the usual appeal to sacred
authority cannot function in the conflict situation, inasmuch as the rival
schools either accept different sacred traditions or interpret the same
tradition diversely. "Rational analysis" is adopted as an impartial arbiter.
Secondly, members of the outgroup (nonbelievers) must be persuaded that
their own faiths are suspect and that another faith has more to commend
it. This again involves rational or pseudorational argument, since there is

Znaniecki's Social Role of the Man of Knowledge

45

no other common unchallenged authority. Finally, the battle of the sacred

schools awakens skepticism on the part of intellectual onlookers, and such
skepticism must be curbed lest it subvert the authority of the sacred school
among the "public." One such safeguard is again rational persuasion. A
body of empirical data to which this analysis is peculiarly appropriate,
though Znaniecki does not explicitly deal with it, is the situation of the
contending Protestant sects during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
These, in the process of validating their claims to sacred authority for their
conflicting views, gradually adopted an elaborate set of rationalistic and
empirical bases for legitimacy. 2 The forces conducing to the secularization
of sacred knowledge in this historical period are readily conceptualized in
Znaniecki's terms. When, however, it becomes manifest that the multiplicity of schools, dogmas, and power structures precludes dominance by
any one school, a modus vivendi is found in a doctrine of mutual toleration.
In summary, then, this little book presents a conceptual framework for
organizing varied materials in one sphere of the sociology of knowledge.
It contributes a rich store of hypotheses which often derive from Znaniecki's
earlier work, and so have a measure of empirical confirmation at the
outset. It should be said, however, as Znaniecki would doubtlessly be the
first to acknowledge, that this book is simply a prolegomenon to the
sociology of men of knowledge; an introduction, moreover, liable to several
criticisms. It includes no systematic documentation, although it may be
inferred from the text that a considerable body of empirical data was the
basis for much of the work. It would have been especially desirable to
include systematic evidence in the generalized account of the ways in
which the various roles presumably developed from earlier structures. At
present, Znaniecki's account is simply a plausible reconstruction, with all
the liabilities to which such developmental schemes are subject. His leading
hypothesis that these roles develop by successive differentiation is amenable to empirical test; until it is so tested it can be considered only conjectural. The value of the work would have been considerably enhanced,
also, if the role-paradigm (social circle, self, status, function) had been
more fully exploited in the analysis of each of the roles actually discussed.
As it is, most attention is devoted to the functions of each role and not
enough to the structural relations between the other components. Perhaps
this is only tantamount to saying that Znaniecki's conceptions are so fertile
that he has found it possible to gather only the ripest of the first fruits. Such
2. Cf. Richard Baxter, Christian Directory (London, 1825), 1:171, in a passage
written in 1665: "They that believe, and know not why, or know no sufficient reason
to warrant their faith, do take a fancy, or opinion, or a dream for faith." Or, Henry
More, Brief Discourse of the True Grounds of the Certainty of Faith in Point of
Religion (London, 1688), p. 578: "To take away all the certainty of sense rightly
circumstantiated, is to take away all the certainty of belief in the main points of
our religion."

46

The Sociology of Knowledge

forthcoming empirical studies as Logan Wilson's Academic Man will

doubtless profit by the conceptual framework which Znaniecki has built for
handling such subjects. His classification is of course provisional and lends
itself to necessary modifications. In short, this is a prospectus which no
future student of the subject dare neglect; it is a promise of things to come
and a promise which is in part its own fulfillment.

Social Conflict
Over Styles of
Sociological
Work
1961

After enjoying more than two generations of scholarly interest, the sociology of knowledge remains largely a subject for meditation rather than a
field of sustained and methodical investigation. This has resulted in the
curious condition that more monographs and papers are devoted to discussions of what the sociology of knowledge is and what it ought to be than
to detailed inquiries into specific problems.
What is true of the sociology of knowledge at large is conspicuously
true of the part concerned with the analysis of the course and character
taken by sociology itself. This, at least, is the composite verdict of the
jury of twelve who have reviewed .for us the social contexts of sociology
in countries all over the world. Almost without exception, the authors of
these papers report (or intimate) that, for their own country, they could
find only fragmentary evidence on which to draw for their account. They
emphasize the tentative and hazardous nature of interpretations based on
such slight foundations. It follows that my own paper, drawing upon the
basic papers on national sociologies, must be even more tentative and
conjectural.
In effect, these authors tell us that they have been forced to resort to
loose generalities rather than being in a position to report firmly grounded
generalizations. Generalities are vague and indeterminate statements that
bring together particulars which are not really comparable; generalizations
report definite though general regularities distilled from the methodical
comparison of comparable data. We all know the kind of generalities
found in the sociology of knowledge: that societies with sharp social
Originally published in Fourth World Congress of Sociology, Transactions (Louvain,
Belgium: International Sociological Association, 1961), 3:21-46; reprinted with
permission.

48

The Sociology of Knowledge

cleavages, as allegedly in France, are more apt to cultivate sociology intensively than societies with a long history of a more nearly uniform valuesystem, as allegedly in England; that a rising social class is constrained to
see the social reality more authentically than a class long in power but
now on the way out; that an upper class will focus on the static aspects of
society and a lower one on its dynamic, changing aspects; that an upper
class wiii be alert to the functions of existing social arrangements and a
lower class to their dysfunctions; or, to take one last familiar generality,
that socially conservative groups hold to multiple-factor doctrines of historical causation and socially radical groups to monistic doctrines. These
and comparable statements may be true or not, but as the authors of the
national reports remind us, we cannot say, for these are not typically the
result of systematic investigations. They are, at best, impressions derived
from a few particulars selected to make the point.
It will be granted that we sociologists cannot afford the dubious luxury
of a double standard of scholarship; one requiring the systematic collection
of comparable data when dealing with complex problems, say, of social
stratification, and another accepting the use of piecemeal illustrations when
dealing with the no less complex problems of the sociology of knowledge.
It might well be, therefore, that the chief outcome of this first session of
the congress will be to arrange for a comparative investigation of sociology
in its social contexts similar to the investigation of social stratification that
the Association has already launched. The problems formulated in the
national papers and the substantial gaps in needed data uncovered by them
would be a useful prelude to such an undertaking.
The growth of a field of intellectual inquiry can be examined under three
aspects: as the historical filiation of ideas considered in their own right;
as affected by the structure of the society in which it is being developed;
and as affected by the social processes relating the men of knowledge
themselves. Other sessions of the congress will deal with the first when the
substance and methods of contemporary sociology are examined. In his
overview, Professor Aron considers the second by examining the impact
on sociology of the changing social structure external to it: industrialization, the organization of universities, the role of distinctive cultural traditions, and the like. He goes on to summarize the central tendencies of
certain national sociologies, principally those of the United States and the
Soviet Union, and assesses their strengths and weaknesses. Rather than go
over much the same ground to arrive at much the same observations, I
shall limit myself to the third of these aspects. I shall say little about the
social structure external to sociologists and focus instead on some social
processes internal to the development of sociology and in particular on the
role in that development played by social conflict between sociologists.

Social Conflict over Styles of Sociological Work

49

There is reason to believe that patterns of social interaction among sociologists, as among other men of science and learning, affect the changing
contours of the discipline just as the cultural accumulation of knowledge
manifestly does. Juxtaposing the national papers gives us an occasion to
note the many substantial similarities if not identities in the development
of sociology in each country that underlie the sometimes more conspicuous
if not necessarily more thoroughgoing differences. These similarities are
noteworthy if only because of the great variability and sometimes profound
differences of social structure, cultural tradition, and contemporary values
among the twelve nations whose sociology has been reviewed. These
societies differ among themselves in the size of the underlying population,
in the character of their systems of social stratification, in the number,
organization, and distribution of their institutions of higher learning, in
their economic organization and the state of their technology, in their
current and past political structure, in their religious and national traditions, in the social composition of their intellectuals, and so on through
other relevant bases of comparison. In view of these diversities of social
structure, it is striking that there are any similarities in the course sociology has taken in these societies. All this suggests that a focus on the
social processes internal to sociology as a partly autonomous domain can
help us to understand a little better the similarities of sociological work in
differing societies. It may at the least help us identify some of the problems that could be profitably taken up in those monographs on the sociological history of sociology that have yet to be written. 1

Phases of Sociological Development

From the national reports, we can distinguish three broad phases in the
development of sociology: first, the differentiation of sociology from antecedent disciplines with its attendant claim to intellectual legitimacy;
second, the quest to establish its institutional legitimacy or academic
autonomy; and third, when this effort has been moderately successful, a
movement toward the reconsolidation of sociology with selected other social
sciences. These well-known phases are of interest here insofar as they
derive from processes of social interaction between sociologists and
between them and scholars in related fields, processes that have left their
distinctive mark on the kinds of work being done by sociologists.
1. One last introductory word: we have been put on notice that since the papers
on national sociologies could not be circulated in advance, we should keep our
general remarks to a minimum. I shall therefore omit much of the concrete material
on which my paper is based.

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The Sociology of Knowledge

Differentiation from other disciplines

The beginnings of sociology are of course found in the antecedent disciplines from which it split off. The differentiation differs in detail but has
much the same general character in country after country. In England, we
are told, sociology derived chiefly from political economy, social administration, and philosophy. In Germany, it shared some of these antecedents
as well as an important one in comparative law. In France, its roots were
in philosophy and, for a time, in the psychologies that were emerging. Its
varied ancestry in the United States included a concern with practical
reform, economics, and, in some degree, anthropology. Or, to tum to some
countries which have been described by their reporters as "sociologically
underdeveloped," in Yugoslavia, sociology became gradually differentiated
from ethnology, the history of law, and anthropogeography; in Spain, it
was long an appendage of philosophy, especially the philosophy of history.
The Latin American countries saw sociology differentiated from jurisprudence, traditionally bound up as it was with an interest in the social contexts of law and the formation of law that came with the creation, in
these states, of governments of their own.
The process of differentiation had direct consequences for the early
emphasis in sociology. Since the founding fathers were self-taught in
sociology-the discipline was, after all, only what they declared it to bethey each found it incumbent to develop a classification of the sciences in
order to locate the distinctive place of sociology in the intellectual scheme
of things. Virtually every sociologist of any consequence throughout the
nineteenth century and partly into the twentieth proposed his own answers
to the socially induced question of the scope and nature of sociology and
saw it as his task to evolve his own system of sociology.
Whether sociology is said to have truly begun with Vico (to say nothing
of a more ancient lineage) or with St. Simon, Comte, Stein, or Marx is of
no great moment here, though it may be symptomatic of current allegiances in sociology. What is in point is that the nineteenth centuryto limit our reference-was the century of sociological systems not necessarily because the pioneering sociologists happened to be system-minded
men but because it was their role, at that time, to seek intellectual legitimacy for this "new science of a very ancient subject." In the situation
confronting them, when the very claim to legitimacy of a new discipline
had to be presented, there was little place for a basic interest in detailed
and delimited investigations of specific sociological problems. It was the
framework of sociological thought itself that had to be built and almost
everyone of the pioneers tried to fashion one for himself.
The banal flippancy tempts us to conclude that there were as many
sociological systems as there were sociologists in this early period. But of

Social Conflict over Styles of Sociological Work

51

course this was not so. The very multiplicity of systems, each with its claim
to being the genuine sociology, led naturally enough to the formation of
schools, each with its masters, disciples, and epigoni. Sociology not only
became differentiated from other disciplines but became internally differentiated. This was not in terms of specialization but in the form of rival
claims to intellectual legitimacy, claims typically held to be mutually
exclusive and at odds. This is one of the roots of the kinds of social
conflict among sociologists today that we shall examine in a little detail.
Institutional legitimacy of sociology
If it was the founding fathers who initiated and defended the claim of

sociology to intellectual legitimacy-as having a justifiable place in the

culture-it was their successors, the founders of modern sociology, who
pressed the claim to institutional legitimacy, by addressing themselves to
those institutionalized status-judges of the intellect: the universities. Here
again, the pattern in different nations differs only in detail. Whether ultimate control of the universities was lodged in the state or the church, it
was their faculties that became the decisive audience for a Weber, Durkheim, or Simmel. Sociology was variously regarded by the faculties as an
illegitimate upstart, lacking warrant for a recognized place in the collegial
family, or sometimes as an institutional competitor. And this social situation repeatedly led to a limited number of responses by sociologists of the
time.
They directed themselves, time and again (as some still do), to the
questions that, satisfactorily answered, would presumably make the case
for sociology as an autonomous academic discipline. They continued to
deal with the question: is a science of society possible? And having satisfied themselves (and, it is hoped, others in the university) that it is, they
turned above all to the further question, whose relevance was reinforced
by the social condition of being on trial: what is sociology? that is to say,
what is its distinctive scope, its distinctive problems, its distinctive functions; in short, its distinctive place in the academic world.
I do not try to enumerate the many answers to these questions, which
we can all readily call to mind. What I do want to suggest is that the longlasting focus on these questions seemed peculiarly pertinent, not only
because of an immediate intellectual interest in them but because these
were generations of sociologists seeking but not yet finding full academic
legitimation. This sort of public search for an identity becomes widespread
in a group rather than being idiosyncratic to a few of its members whenever a status or a way of life has yet to win acceptance or is under attack.
The socially induced search for an institutional identity led sociologists
to identify a jurisdiction unshared by other disciplines. Simmel's notion of

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The Sociology of Knowledge

a geometry of social interaction and his enduring attention to the so-called

molecular components of social relations is only one of the best-known
efforts to center on elements of social life that were not systematically
treated by other disciplines. It would be too facile to "derive" his interest
in the distinctive sociology of everyday life from his experience of having
been excluded, until four years before his death, from a professorship in a
field that was still suspect. But this kind of individual experience may have
reinforced an interest that had other sources. The early sociologists in the
United States were responding to a comparable social situation in much
the same way, locating such subjects of life in society as "corrections and
charities" that had not yet been "preempted" for study.
A related consequence of the quest for academic legitimacy was the
motivated separation of sociology from the other disciplines: the effort
to achieve autonomy through self-isolation. We have only to remember,
for example, Durkheim's taboo on the use of systematic psychology which,
partly misunderstood, for so long left its stamp on the work stemming from
this influential tradition in sociology.
The struggle for academic status may have reinforced the utilitarian
emphasis found in sociology, whether in its positivistic or Marxist beginnings. However much the dominant schools disagreed in other respects,
they all saw sociology as capable of being put to use for concerted objectives. The differences lay not in the repudiation or acceptance of utility
as an important criterion of sociological knowledge but in the conception
of what was useful.
As sociology achieved only limited recognition by the universities, it
acquired peripheral status through the organizational device of research
institutes. These have been of various kinds: as adjuncts to universities;
as independent of universities but state-supported or aided; and, in a few
cases, as private enterprises. Socially, they tended to develop where the
university system was felt to provide insufficient recognition. Just as in
the seventeenth century, when no one arrived at the seemingly obvious
thought of basing research laboratories for the physical sciences in the
university, so we have witnessed a comparable difficulty, now overcome
in many quarters, in arriving at the idea that the universities should house
research organizations in the social sciences. They are now to be found in
just about every country represented here. With their prevalently apprentice system of research training and, as the national papers report, with
their greater readiness to try out new orientations in sociology, these institutes might well tum out to be a major force in the advancement of sociology. If so, they would represent an intellectual advance substantially
responsive to the social situation of institutional exclusion or underrecognition.

Social Conflict over Styles of Sociological Work

53

Reconsolidation with other disciplines

As the institutional legitimacy of sociology becomes substantially acknowledged-which does not mean, of course, that it is entirely free from attack
-the pressure for separatism from other disciplines declines. No longer
challenged seriously as having a right to exist, sociology links up again
with some of its siblings. But since new conceptions and new problems
have meanwhile emerged, this does not necessarily mean reconsolidation
with the same disciplines from which sociology drew its origins in a particular country.
Patterns of collaboration between the social sciences differ somewhat
from country to country and it would be a further task for the monographs
on the sociology of sociology to try to account for these variations. Some
of these patterns are found repeatedly. In France, we are told, the longlasting connection between sociology and ethnology, which the Durkheim
group had welded together, has now become more tenuous, with sociologists being increasingly associated with psychologists, political scientists,
and geographers. In the United States, as another example, the major
collaboration is with psychology-social psychology being the area of
convergence-and with anthropology. Another cluster links sociology with
political science and, to some extent, with economics. There are visible
stirrings to renew the linkage, long attenuated in the United States, of
sociology with history. The events long precede their widespread recognition. At the very time that American graduate students of sociology are
learning to repeat the grievance that historical contexts have been lost to
view by systematic sociology, the national organization of sociologists
is devoting annual sessions to historical sociology and newer generations
of sociologists, such as Bellah, Smelser, and Diamond are removing the
occasion for the grievance through their work and their program.
Each of the various patterns of interdisciplinary collaboration has its
intellectual rationale. They are not merely the outcome of social forces.
However, these rationales are apt to be more convincing, I suggest, to
sociologists who find that their discipline is no longer on trial. It has become sufficiently legitimized that they no longer need maintain a defensive
posture of isolation. Under these social circumstances, interdisciplinary
work becomes a self-evident value and may even be exaggerated into a
cultish requirement.
Summary

In concluding this sketch of three phases in the development of sociology,

I should like to counter possible misunderstandings.
It is not being said that sociology in every society moves successively
through these phases, with each promptly supplanted by the next. Con-

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cretely, these phases overlap and coexist. Nevertheless, it is possible to

detect in the national reports a distinct tendency for each phase to be
dominant for a time and to become so partly as a result of the social
processes of opposition and collaboration that have been briefly examined.
It is not being said, also, that the social processes internal to sociology
and related disciplines fully determine the course sociology has taken. But
it is being said that together with culturally induced change in the contours
of sociology, resulting from the interplay of ideas and cumulative knowledge there is also socially induced change, such that particular preoccupations, orientations, and ideas that come to "make sense" to sociologists
in one phase elicit little interest among them in another. The concrete
development of sociology is of course not the product only of social processes immanent to the field. It is the resultant of social and intellectual
forces internal to the discipline with both of these being influenced by the
. environing social structure, as the reports on national sociologies and the
companion piece by Professor Aron have noted. The emphasis on social
processes internal to sociology is needed primarily because the sociology
of knowledge has for so long centered on the relations between social
structures, external to intellectual life, and the course taken by one or
another branch of knowledge.
Continuing with this same restriction of focus on social processes internal to the discipline, I turn now to some of the principal occasions for
conflict between various styles of sociological work. In doing so, I am
again mindful of the need for monographs on the sociological history of
sociology emphasized in the papers presented to this session. If the linkages
between sociology and social structure are to be seriously investigated,
then it is necessary to decide which aspects of sociology might be so related.
These would presumably include, as Professor Aron has indicated, the
questions it asks, the concepts it employs, the objects it studies, and the
types of explanations it adopts. One way of identifying the alternative
orientations, commitments, and functions ascribed to sociology is by examining, however briefly, the principal conflicts and polemics that have raged
among sociologists. For these presumably exhibit the alternative paths that
sociology might have taken in a particular society, but did not, as well as
the paths it has taken. In reviewing some of these conflicts, I do not propose to consider the merits of one or another position. These are matters
that will be examined in the other sessions of the congress that deal with
the various specialties and with the uses of sociology. I intend to consider
them only as they exhibit alternative lines of development in sociology that
are influenced by the larger social structure and by social processes internal to sociology itself.

Social Conflict over Styles of Sociological Work

55

Some Uniformities in the Conflict of Sociological Styles

A few general observations may provide a guide through the jungle of
sociological controversy.
First, the reports on national sociologies naturally center on the dominant kinds of sociological work found in each country; on the modes rather
than on the less frequent variants. But to judge from the reports, these
sociologies differ not only in their central tendencies but also in the extent
of variation around these tendencies. Each country provides for different
degrees of heterodoxy in sociological thought, and these differences are
probably socially patterned. In the Soviet Union, for example, there appears
to be a marked concentration in the styles of sociological work with little
variability: a heavy commitment to Marxist-Leninist theory with divergence from it only in minor details; a great concentration on the problem
of the forces making for sequences of historical development of total societies; and a consequent emphasis, with little dispersion, upon historical
evidence as the major source material. It would be instructive to compare
the extent of dispersion around the dominant trends of sociological work
in the United States, which are periodically subjected to violent attacks
from within, as in the formidable book by Sorokin, Fads and Foibles in
Modern Sociology, and in the recent little book by C. Wright Mills which,
without the same comprehensive and detailed citation of seeming cases in
point, follows much the same lines of arguments as those advanced by
Sorokin. As we compare the national sociologies, we should consider how
the social organization of intellectual life affects the extent to which the
central tendencies of each country's sociology are concentrated.
Much of the controversy among sociologists involves social conflict and
not only intellectual criticism. Often, it is.~less a matter of contradictions
between sociological ideas than of competing definitions of the role considered appropriate for the sociologist. Intellectual conflict of course occurs;
an unremitting Marxist sociology and an unremitting Weberian or Parsonian sociology do make contradictory assumptions. But in considering
the cleavages among a nation's sociologists, or among those of different
nations, we should note whether the occasion for dispute is this kind of
substantive or methodological contradiction or rather the claim that this
or that sociological problem, this or that set of ideas, is not receiving the
attention it allegedly deserves. I suggest that very often these polemics
have more to do with the allocation of intellectual resources among different kinds of sociological work than with a closely formulated opposition
of sociological ideas.

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These controversies follow the classically identified course of social

conflict. 2 Attack is followed by counterattack, with progressive alienation
of each party to the conflict. Since the conflict is public, it becomes a
status battle more nearly than a search for truth. (How many sociologists
have publicly admitted to error as a result of these polemics?) The consequent polarization leads each group of sociologists to respond largely to
stereotyped versions of what is being done by the other. As Professor
Germani says, Latin American sociologists stereotype the North Americans
as mere nose-counters or mere fact-finders or merely descriptive sociographers. Or others become stereotyped as inveterately speculative, entirely
unconcerned with compelling evidence, or as committed to doctrines that
are so formulated that they cannot be subjected to disproof.
Not that these stereotypes have no basis in reality at all, but only that,
in the course of social conflict, they become self-confirming stereotypes
as sociologists shut themselves off from the experience that might modify
them. The sociologists of each camp develop selective perceptions of what
is actually going on in the other. They see in the other's work primarily
what the hostile stereotype has alerted them to see, and then promptly
mistake the part for the whole. In this process, each group of sociologists
become less and less motivated to study the work of the other, since there
is manifestly little point in doing so. They scan the out-group's writings
just enough to find ammunition for new fusillades.
The process of reciprocal alienation and stereotyping is probably reinforced by the great increase in the bulk of sociological publication. Like
many other scholars, sociologists can no longer keep up with all that is
being published in their field. They must become more and more selective
in their reading. And this selectivity readily leads those who are hostile to
a particular line of sociological work to give up studying the very publications that might possibly have led them to abandon their stereotype.
All this tends to move towards the emergence of an all-or-none doctrine.
Sociological orientations that are not substantively contradictory are regarded as if they were. Sociological inquiry, it is said, must be statistical
or historical in character; only the great issues of the time must be the
objects of study or these refractory issues of freedom or compulsion must
be avoided because they are not amenable to scientific investigation; and
so on.
The process of social conflict would more often be halted in mid-course
and instead turn into intellectual criticism if there were nonreciprocation
of affect, if a stop were put to the reciprocity of contempt that typically
marks these polemics. But we do not ordinarily find here the social setting
2. For an unsolemn but serious extension of these observations on social conflict
as distinct from cognitive controversy in science, see R. K. Merton, On The
Shoulders of Giants (New York: The Free Press, 1965; New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1967), pp. 25-29.-ED.

Social Conflict over Styles of Sociological Work

51

that seems required for the nonreciprocation of affect to operate with regularity. This requires a differentiation of status between the parties, at least
with respect to the occasion giving rise to the expression of hostility. When
this status differentiation is present, as with the lawyer and his client or
the psychiatrist and his patient, the nonreciprocity of expressed feeling is
governed by a technical norm attached to the more authoritative status
in the relationship. But in scientific controversies, which typically take
place among a company of equals for the occasion (however much the
status of the parties might otherwise differ) and, moreover, which take
place in public, subject to the observation of peers, this structural basis
for nonreciprocation of affect is usually absent. Instead, rhetoric is met
with rhetoric, contempt with contempt, and the intellectual issues become
subordinated to the battle for status.
In these polarized controversies, also, there is usually little room for the
third, uncommitted party who might convert social conflict into intellectual
criticism. True, some sociologists in every country will not adopt the allor-none position that is expected in social conflict. They will not be drawn
into what are essentially disputes over the definition of the role of the
sociologist and over the allocation of intellectual resources though put
forward as conflicts of sociological ideas. But typically, these would-be
noncombatants are caught in the crossfire between the hostile camps. Depending on the partisan vocabulary of abuse that happens to prevail, they
become tagged either as "mere eclectics," with the epithet, by convention,
making it unnecessary to examine the question of what it asserts or how
far it holds true; or, they are renegades, who have abandoned the sociological truth; or, perhaps worst of all, they are mere middle-of-the-roaders
or fence-sitters who, through timidity or expediency, will not see that they
are fleeing from the fundamental conflict between unalloyed sociological
good and unalloyed sociological evil.
We all know the proverb that "conflict is the gadfly of truth." Now,
proverbs, that abiding source of social science for the millions, often express a part-truth just as they often obscure that truth by not referring to
the conditions under which it holds. This seems to be such a case. As we
have noted, in social conflict cognitive issues become warped and distorted
as they are pressed into the service of "scoring off the other fellow." Nevertheless, when the conflict is regulated by the community of peers, it has
its uses for the advancement of the discipline. With some regularity, it
seems to come into marked effect whenever a particular line of investigation-say, of small groups-or a particular set of ideas-say, functional
analysis-or a particular mode of inquiry-say, historical sociology or
social surveys-has engrossed the attention and energies of a large and
growing number of sociologists. Were it not for such conflict, the reign
of orthodoxies in sociology would be even more marked than it sometimes
is. Self-assertive claims that allegedly neglected problems, methods, and

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theoretical orientation merit more concerted attention than they are receiving may serve to diversify the work that gets done. With more room
for heterodoxy, there is more prospect of intellectually productive ventures,
until these develop into new orthodoxies.
Even with their frequent intellectual distortions (and possibly, sometimes because of them), polemics may help redress accumulative imbalances in scientific inquiry. No one knows, I suppose, what an optimum
distribution of resources in a field of inquiry would be, not least of all,
because of the ultimate disagreement over the criteria of the optimum. But
progressive concentrations of effort seem to evoke counterreactions, so
that less popular but intellectually and socially relevant problems, ideas,
and modes of inquiry do not fade out altogether. In social science as in
other fields of human effort, a line of development that has caught onperhaps because it has proved effective for dealing with certain problems
-attracts a growing proportion of newcomers to the field who perpetuate
and increase that concentration. With fewer recruits of high caliber, those
engaged in the currently unpopular fields will have a diminished capacity
to advance their work and with diminished accomplishments, they become
even less attractive. The noisy claims to underrecognition of particular
kinds of inquiry, even when accompanied by extravagantly rhetorical
attacks on the work that is being prevalently done, may keep needed intellectual variants from drying up and may curb a growing concentration
on a narrowly limited range of problems. At least, this possibility deserves
study by the sociologist of knowledge.
These few observations on social conflict, as distinct from intellectual
criticism, are commonplace enough, to begin with. It would be a pity if
they were banalized as asserting that peace between sociologists should
be sought at any price. When there is genuine opposition of ideas-when
one set of ideas plainly contradicts another-then agreement for the sake
of peaceful quiet would mean abandoning the sociological enterprise. I am
suggesting only that when we consider the current disagreements among
sociologists, we find that many of them are not so much cognitive oppositions as contrasting evaluations of the worth of one and another kind of
sociological work. They are bids for support by the social system of sociologists. For the sociologist of knowledge, these conflicts afford clues to the
alternatives from which the sociologists of each country are making their
deliberate or unwitting selection.
Types of Polemics in Sociology
These general remarks are intended as a guide to the several dozen foci
of conflict between sociologists. Let me comfort you by saying that I shall
not consider all of them here, nor is it necessary. Instead, I shall review

Social Conflict over Styles of Sociological Work

59

two or three of them in a little detail and then merely identify some of the
rest for possible discussion.
The trivial and the important in sociology

Perhaps the most pervasive polemic, the one which, as I have implied,
underlies most of the rest, stems from the charge by some sociologists that
others are busily engaged in the study of trivia, while all about them the
truly significant problems of human society go unexamined. After all, so
this argument goes, while war and exploitation, poverty, injustice, and
insecurity plague the life of men in society or threaten their very existence,
many sociologists are fiddling with subjects so remote from these catastrophic troubles as to be irresponsibly trivial.
This charge typically assumes that it is the topic, the particular objects
under study, that fixes the importance or triviality of the investigation. This
is an old error that refuses to stay downed, as a glance at the history of
thought will remind us. To some of his contemporaries, Galileo and his
successors were obviously engaged in a trivial pastime, as they watched
balls rolling down inclined planes rather than attending to such really
important topics as means of improving ship construction that would
enlarge commerce and naval might. At about the same time, the Dutch
microscopist, Swammerdam, was the butt of ridicule by those far-seeing
critics who knew that sustained attention to his "tiny animals," the microorganisms, was an unimaginative focus on patently trivial minutiae. These
critics often had authoritative social support. Charles II, for example,
could join in the grand joke about the absurdity of trying to "weigh the
ayre," as he learned of the fundamental work on atmospheric pressure
which to his mind was nothing more than childish diversion and idle
amusement when compared with the Big Topics to which natural philosophers should attend. The history of science provides a long if not endless
list of instances of the easy confusion between the seemingly self-evident
triviality of the object under scrutiny and the cognitive significance of the
investigation.
Nevertheless, the same confusion periodically turns up anew in sociology. Consider the contributions of a Durkheim for a moment: his choice
of the division of labor in society, of its sources and consequences, would
no doubt pass muster as a significant subject, but what of the subject of
suicide? Pathetic as suicide may be for the immediate survivors, it can
seldom be included among the major troubles of a society. Yet we know
that Durkheim's analysis of suicide proved more consequential for sociology than his analysis of social differentiation; that it advanced our understanding of the major problem of how social structures generate behavior
that is at odds with the prescriptions of the culture, a problem that confronts every kind of social organization.

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The Sociology of Knowledge

You can add at will, from the history of sociology and other sciences,
instances which show that there is no necessary relation between the
socially ascribed importance of the object under examination and the
scope of its implications for an understanding of how society or nature
works. The social and the scientific significance of a subject matter can
be poles apart.
The reason for this is, of course, that ideally that empirical object is
selected for study which enables one to investigate a scientific problem
to particularly good advantage. Often, these intellectually strategic objects
hold little intrinsic interest, either for the investigator or anyone else.
Again, there is nothing peculiar to sociology here. Nor is one borrowing
the prestige of the better-established sciences by noting that all this is
taken for granted there. It is not an intrinsic interest in the fruit fly or the
bacteriophage that leads the geneticist to devote so much attention to them.
It is only that they have been found to provide strategic materials for
working out selected problems of genetic transmission. Comparing an
advanced field with a retarded one, we find much the same thing in sociology. Sociologists centering on such subjects as the immigrant, the stranger,
small groups, voting decisions, or the social organization of industrial
firms need not do so because of an intrinsic interest in them. They may be
chosen, instead, because they strategically exhibit such problems as those
of marginal men, reference group behavior, the social process of conformity, patterned sources of nonconformity, the social determination of
aggregated individual decisions, and the like.
When the charge of triviality is based on a common-sense appraisal of
the outer appearance of subject matter alone, it fails to recognize that a
major part of the intellectual task is to find the materials that are strategic
for getting to the heart of a problem. If we want to move toward a better
understanding of the roots and kinds of social conformity and the socially
induced sources of nonconformity, we must consider the types of concrete
situations in which these can be investigated to best advantage. It does not
mean a commitment to a particular object. It means answering questions
such as these: which aspects of conformity as a social process can be
observed most effectively in small, admittedly contrived, and adventitious
groups temporarily brought together in the laboratory but open to detailed
observations? which aspects of conformity can be better investigated in
established bureaucracies? and which require the comparative study of
organizations in different societies? So with sociological problems of every
kind: the forms of authority; the conditions under which power is converted into authority and authority into power; limits on the range of
variability among social institutions within particular societies; processes
of self-defeating and self-fulfilling cultural mandates; and so on.

Social Conflict over Styles of Sociological Work

61

If we ask, in turn, how we assess the significance of the sociological

problem (rather than that of the object under scrutiny), then, it seems to
me, sociologists have found no better answer than that advanced by Max
Weber and others in the notion of Wertbeziehung. It is the relevance of the
problem to men's values, the puzzles about the workings of social structure
and its change that engage men's interests and loyalties. And the fact is
that this rough-and-ready criterion is so loose that there is ample room
for differing evaluations of the worth, as distinct from the validity and
truth, of a sociological investigation even among those who ostensibly
have the same general scheme of values. The case for the significance of
problems of reference-group behavior, for example, stems from the cumulative recognition, intimated but not followed up by sociologists from at
least the time of Marx, that the behavior, attitudes, and loyalties of men
are not uniformly determined by their current social positions and affiliations. Puzzling inconsistencies in behavior are becoming less puzzling by
systematically following up the simple idea that people's patterned selection of groups other than their own provide frames of normative reference
which intervene between the influence of their current social position and
their behavior.
In short, the attack on the alleged triviality of much sociological work,
found apparently in all the national sociologies, is something less than the
self-evident case it is made out to be. It often derives from a misconception of the connection between the selection of an object for study, the
object having little intrinsic significance for people in the society, and
the strategic value of that object for helping to clarify a significant sociological problem. In saying this, I assume that I will not be misunderstood.
I am not saying that there is no genuinely trivial work in contemporary
sociology any more than it can be said that there was no trivial work in
the physical science of the seventeenth century. Quite otherwise: it may
be that our sociological journals during their first fifty years have as large
a complement of authentic trivia as the Transactions of the Royal Society
contained during their first fifty years (to pursue the matter no further).
But these are trivia in the strict rather than the rhetorical sense: they are
publications which are both intellectually and socially inconsequential.
But much of the attack on alleged trivia in today's sociology is directed
against entire classes of investigation solely because the objects they examine do not enjoy widespread social interest.
This most pervasive of polemics sets problems for those prospective
monographs on the sociological history of sociology. As I have repeatedly
said, we are here not concerned with the substantive merit of the charges
and rejoinders involved in any particular polemic of this kind. These can
be and possibly will be discussed in the later sessions of this congress. But

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for the sociological analysis of the history of sociology, there remains

the task of finding out the social sources and consequences of assigning
triviality or importance to particular lines of inquiry. It seems improbable
that the angels of light are all on one side and the angels of darkness, all
on the other. If the division is not simply between the wise and the foolish,
there must be other bases, some of them presumably social, for the various
distributions of evaluation. The discussions that are to follow in this session
might usefully be devoted to interpretations that might account for the
opposed positions taken up in the assignment of merit to particular kinds
of sociological work.
The alleged cleavage between substantive sociology and methodology
Another deep-seated and long-lasting conflict, requiring the same kind of
interpretation, has developed between those sociologists who are primarily
or exclusively concerned with inquiry into substantive problems of society
and those who are primarily or exclusively concerned with solving the
methodological problems entailed by such inquiry. Unlike the kind of intellectual criticism often developed within each of these camps, designed
to clarify cognitive issues, this debate has the earmarks of social conflict,
designed to best the opponent.
The main lines of attack on methodology and the replies to these are
familiar enough to need only short summary.
Concern with methodology, it is said, succeeds only in diverting the
attention of sociologists from the major substantive problems of society.
It does so by turning from the study of society to the study of how to
study society.
To this, it is replied, in the words of one philosopher: "you cannot
know too much of methods which you always employ." Responsible inquiry requires intellectual self-awareness. Whether they know it or not,
the investigators speak methodological prose and some specialists must
work out its grammar. To try to discover the rates of social mobility and
some of their consequences, for example, first requires solving the methodological problems of devising suitable classifications of classes, appropriate
measures of rates, and the like, as some sociologists have learned, to their
discomfiture.
Again, it is charged, that a concern with the logic of method quickly
deteriorates into "mere technicism." These would-be precisionists strain
at a gnat and swallow a camel: they are exacting in details and careless
about their basic assumptions. For an interest in substantive questions
they substitute an interest in seeming precision for its own sake. They try
to use a razor blade to hack their way through forests. These technical
virtuosos are committed to the use of meticulous means to frivolous ends.

Social Conflict over Styles of Sociological Work

63

The rebuttal holds that it is the methodologically naive, those knowing

little or nothing of the foundations of procedure, who are most apt to
misuse precise measures on materials for which they are not suited. Further, that it is the assumptions underlying the quick and ready use of
verbal constructs by investigators of substantive problems which need,
and receive, critical scrutiny and clarification by the methodologist.
It is argued that the methodologist turns research technician in spite of
himself, and becomes an aimless itinerant, moving in whatever direction
his research techniques summon him. He studies changing patterns of
voting because these are readily accessible to his techniques rather than
the workings of political institutions and organizations for which he has
not evolved satisfying techniques of investigation.
The rejoinder holds that the selection of substantive problems is not
the task of specialists in methodology. Once the problem is selected, however, the question ensues of how to design an inquiry so that it can contribute to a solution of the problem. The effort to answer such questions
of design is part of the business of methodology.
During at least the last half-century, ideological significance has also
been ascribed to methodological work. The methodologist is said to choose
a politically "safe" focus of work rather than attend to substantive inquiries
that might catch him up in criticism of the social institutions about him.
This allegation is treated by methodologists as not only untrue, but
irrelevant. Practically all disciplines, even the strictly formal ones of logic
and mathematics, have at one time or another been assigned political or
ideological import. As we have been told here, even certain procedures
of sociological research, such as "large-scale fieldwork" and the use of
attitude scales, have been regarded as politically suspect in some nations.
The irrelevance of the charge lies on its surface where the indefensible
effort is made to merge intellectual and political criteria of scientific work.
The complaint is heard that the methodologist supposes knowledge to
consist only of that which can be measured or at least counted. He is addicted to numbers. As a result, he retreats from historical inquiry and
from all other forms of sociological inquiry where even crude measures
have not been devised or where, in principle, they cannot be.
To the methodologist, this is a distorted image, fashioned by the uninformed who run as they read. He regards himself as no more committed
to working out the logic of tests and measurements than the logic of historical and institutional analysis. This he points out, has been understood
by sociologists of consequence, at least from the time of Max Weber who,
as Professor Adorno reminds us, "devoted a large part of his work to
methodology, in the form of philosophical reflections on the nature and
procedures of sociology," and who considered the methodology of historical inquiry, in particular, an important part of the sociological enterprise.

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Since the opponents in this controversy show no trace of being either

vanquished or converted, this raises anew the question of the grounds,
other than intellectual, for maintaining their respective positions. Like the
other persistent conflicts I shall now summarize far more briefly, this one
sets a problem for the sociologist of knowledge.
The lone scholar and the research team
Until the last generation or so, the sociologist, like most other academic
men, worked as an individual scholar (or, as the idiom has it, as a "lone
scholar"). Since then, as the national reports inform us, institutes for
sociological research have multiplied all over the world. This change in
the social organization of sociological work has precipitated another conflict, with its own set of polarized issues.
The new forms of research are characterized, invidiously rather than
descriptively or analytically, as the bureaucratization of the sociological
mind. The research organization is said to stultify independent thought, to
deny autonomy to members of the research staff, to suffer a displacement
of motive such that researches are conducted in order to keep the research
team or organization in operation rather than have the organization provide the facilities for significant research; and so on through the familiar
calendar of indictments.
In return, it is pointed out that the individual scholar has not been as
much alone as the description may imply. He was (and often is) at the
apex of a group of research assistants and graduate students who follow
his lead. Moreover, he has had to limit his problems for serious research
to those for which the evidence lay close to hand, principally in libraries.
He cannot deal with the many problems that require the systematic collection of large-scale data which are not provided for him by the bureaucracies that assemble census data and other materials of social bookkeeping.
The research institute is said to extend and to deepen kinds of investigation that the individual scholar is foreclosed from tackling. Finally, it is
suggested that close inspection of how these institutes actually work will
find that many of them consist of individual scholars with associates and
assistants, each group engaged in pursuing its own research bents.
This continuing debate affords another basis for inquiry, this time into
the ways in which the social organization of sociological research in fact
affects the character of the research. This would require the kind of systematic comparison of the work being done by individual scholars and by
research teams, a methodical comparison which, so far as I know, has yet
to be made. Not that the results of this inquiry will necessarily do away
with the conflict but only that it will contribute to that as yet largely unwritten sociological history of sociology whose outlines all of us here aim
to sketch out.

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65

Cognitive agreement and value disagreement

A particularly instructive type of case is provided by seeming intellectual

conflict that divides sociologists of differing ideological persuasion. Upon
inspection, this often (not, of course, always) turns out to involve cognitive agreements that are obscured by a basic opposition of values and
interests.
To illustrate this type of conflict, we can draw upon a few observations
by Marx and by so-called bourgeois sociologists. You will recall Marx's
observation that in a capitalist society, social mobility "consolidates the
rule of capital itself, enabling it to recruit ever new forces for itself out of
the lower layers of society." This general proposition has won independent
assent from all manner of non-Marxist sociologists, not least of all from
one such as Pareto. The lines of disputation are not therefore drawn about
the supposed fact of these systematic consequences of social mobility. The
conflict appears only in the evaluation of these consequences. For, as
Marx went on to say, the "more a ruling class is able to assimilate the
most prominent men of the dominated class the more stable and dangerous
is its rule." A Pareto could agree with the stabilizing function of such
mobility while rejecting the judgment of it as "dangerous." What empirical
investigations by "bourgeois sociologists" can do, and are doing, is to find
out how far the cognitively identical assumption of a Marx and a Pareto
holds true. To what extent do these mobile men identify themselves with
their newfound class? Who among them retain loyalty to the old? When
does it result in a consolidation of power and when, under conditions of
retained values, does it modify the bases of cleavage between classes?
You can readily add other instances of agreement in sociological ideas
being mistaken for disagreement, owing to an overriding conflict of values
or interests between sociologists. When the functionalists examine religion
as a social mechanism for reinforcing common sentiments that make for
social integration, they do not differ significantly in their analytic framework from the Marxists who, if the metaphor of the opium of the masses
is converted into a neutral statement of alleged consequences, assert the
same sort of thing, except that they evaluate these consequences differently.
Religion is then seen as a device for social exploitation.
Again, it has often been noted that Marx, in his theory, underrated the
social significance of his own moral ideas. The emphasis on communist
doctrine and ideology is perhaps the best pragmatic testimony that, whatever Marxist theory may say in general of the role of ideas in history,
Marxists in practice ascribe great importance to ideas as movers, if not as
prime movers, in history. If this were not so, the communist emphasis
on a proper ideological commitment would be merely expressive rather
than instrumental behavior.

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Or, to take one last instance, Marx repeatedly noted that the patterns
of production-for example, in large-scale industry and among smallholding peasants-have each a distinctive social ecology. The spatial distribution of men on the job was held to affect the frequency and kind of
social interaction between them and this, in turn, to affect their political
outlook and the prospects of their collective organization. In these days,
a large body of investigation by non-Marxists, both in industrial and in
rural sociology, is centered on this same variable of the social ecology
of the job, together with its systemic consequences. But again, this continuity of problem and of informing idea tends to be obscured by conflicts
in political orientation. Detailed monographic study is needed to determine
the extent to which lines of sociological development fail to converge and
instead remain parallel because of ideological rather than theoretical
conflict.
Formal (abstract) and concrete sociology

Time and again, in the papers on national sociology, reference is made

to the dangers of a "merely" formal sociology. This signals another familiar
cleavage, that between concrete and abstract sociology. The first centers
on interpreting particular historical constellations and developments. Sometimes these are society-wide in character; sometimes they are more limited
social formations. The problem may be to explain the rise and transformation of Christianity or of capitalism, of particular class structures, familysystems or social institutions of science. The second, the formal orientation,
is directed toward formulating general propositions and models of interpretation that cut across a variety of historically concrete events. Here
the focus is on such abstract matters as role-theory, social processes of
legitimation, the effect of the size of a group on its characteristic patterns
of social interaction, and so on.
To some, formal sociology is an invidious epithet. It is ascribed to
"defenders of the established order" who expressly neglect social change
and deny that there are discoverable uniformities of social change. For
these critics, formal sociology is like a sieve that strains out all the awkward facts that fail to suit its theory. To others, concrete sociology is seen
as having some utility but at the price of abdicating the search for those
social regularities that presumably occur in cultures of most different kind.
It would serve little purpose to note the obvious at this point, for it is
precisely the obvious that gets lost in this conflict between commitments
to primarily concrete and primarily abstract sociologies. Little will be
gained in repeating, therefore, that concrete sociological investigations of
course make at least implicit use of abstract models-that, for example,
in order even to depict social change, let alone account for it, one must
identify the formally defined elements and patterns of social structure that

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61

are changing-and conversely, that these models often grow out of and
are modified and judged by their applicability to selected aspects of concrete social events. With respect to this conflict, the sociology of knowledge
confronts such problems as that of finding out whether, as is commonly
said, formal sociology is linked with politically conservative orientations
and concrete sociology with politically radical orientations. Furthermore,
how this social cleavage affects the prospects of methodical interplay between the two types of sociology.
A short miscellany of sociological conflicts

There is time only to list and not at all to discuss a few more of the current
conflicts in sociology.
The microscopic and the macroscopic. More than ever before, conflict is
focused on the social units singled out for investigation. This is often
described by the catchwords of "microscopic" and "macroscopic" sociology. The industrial firm is said to be studied in isolation from the larger
economic and social system or, even more, particular groups within the
single plant are observed apart from their relations with the rest of the
organization and the community. A microscopic focus is said to lead to
"sociology without society." A counteremphasis centers on the laws of
evolution of "the total society." Here, the prevailing critique asserts that
the hypotheses are put so loosely that no set of observations can be taken
to negate them. They are invulnerable to disproof and so, rather a matter
of faith than of knowledge.
Experiment and natural history in sociology. A parallel cleavage has developed between commitment to experimental sociology, typically though
not invariably dealing with contrived or "artificial" small groups, and
commitment to study of the natural history of groups or social systems.
Perhaps the instructive analogue here is to be found in the well-known
fact that Darwin and Wallace found certain problems forced upon their
attention when they reflected on what they saw in nature "on the large, on
the outdoor scale" but that they failed to see other related problems that
came into focus for the laboratory naturalists. Polarization into mutually
exclusive alternatives served little purpose there and it remains to be seen
whether it will prove any more effective in the advancement of sociology.
Reference-groups of sociologists. Conflict is found also in the sometimes
implicit selection of reference-groups and audiences by sociologists. Some
direct themselves primarily to the literati or to the "educated general
public"; others, to the so-called men of affairs who manage economic or
political organizations; while most are oriented primarily to their fellow

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academicians and professionals. The recurrent noise about jargon, cults of

unintelligibility, the overly abundant use of statistics or of mathematical
models is largely generated by the sociologists who have the general public
as their major reference-group. The work of these outer-oriented sociologists, in turn, is described by their academic critics as sociological journalism, useful more for arousing public interest in sociology than for advancing
sociological knowledge. They are said to persuade by rhetoric rather than
to instruct by responsible analysis-and so on. It would be instructive to
study the actual social roles and functions of these diversely oriented sociologists, rather than to remain content with offhand descriptions such as
these, even though again we cannot expect that the results of such sudy
would modify current alignments.
Sociology vs. social psychology. One last debate requires mention, at least.
It is charged that many sociologists, especially in the United States, are

converting sociology into social psychology, with the result that the study
of social institutions is fading into obscurity. The trend toward social
psychology is said to be bound up with an excessive emphasis on the
subjective element in social action, with a focus on men's attitudes and
sentiments at the expense of considering the institutional conditions for
the emergence and the effective or ineffective expression of these attitudes.
To this, the polarized response holds that social. institutions comprise an
idle construct until they are linked up empirically with the actual attitudes
and values and the actual behavior of men, whether this is conceived as
purposive or as also unwitting, as decisions or as responses. These sociologists consider the division between the two disciplines an unfortunate
artifact of academic organization. And again, apart from the merits of
one or the other position, we have much to learn about the social bases for
their being maintained by some and rejected by others.

A Concluding Observation
In the final remark on these and the many other lines of cleavage among
sociologists, I should like to apply a formulation about the structure of
social conflict in relation to the intensity of conflict that was clearly stated
by Georg Simmel and Edward Ross. This is the hypothesis, in the words
of Ross, that
a society . . . which is riven by a dozen . . . (conflicts) along lines running in
every direction, may actually be in less danger of being torn with violence or
falling to pieces than one split along just one line. For each new cleavage
contributes to narrow the cross clefts, so that one might say that society
is sewn togeher by its inner conflicts.

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69

It is a hypothesis borne out by its own history, for since it was set forth
by Simmel and by Ross, it has been taken up or independently originated
by some scores of sociologists, many of whom take diametrically opposed
positions on some of the issues we have reviewed. (I mention only a few
of these: Wiese and Becker, Hiller, Myrdal, Parsons, Berelson, Lazarsfeld
and McPhee, Robin Williams, Coser, Dahrendorf, Coleman, Lipset and
Zelditch, and among the great number of recent students of "statusdiscrepancy," Lenski, Adams, Stogdill, and Hemphill.)
Applied to our own society of sociologists, the Simmel-Ross hypothesis
has this to say. If the sociologists of one nation take much the same
position on each of these many issues while the sociologists of another
nation consistently hold to the opposed position on them all, then the lines
of cleavage will have become so consolidated along a single axis that any
conversation between the sociologists of these different nations will be
pointless. But if, as I believe is the case, there is not this uniformity of
outlook among the sociologists of each nation; if individual sociologists
have different combinations of position on these and kindred issues, then
effective intellectual criticism can supplant social conflict.
That is why the extent of heterodoxies among the sociologists of each
nation has an important bearing on the future development of world sociology. The heterodoxies in one nation provide intellectual linkages with
orthodoxies in other nations. On the worldwide scale of sociology, this
bridges lines of cleavage and makes for the advance of sociological science
rather than of sociological ideologies.